Preparations

After a busy holiday weekend, and several days catching up, I'm back in the studio with a variety of tasks that will get me closer to actually weaving real cloth.

I've woven samples of two jacquard designs to check aspect ratio, and have made the appropriate modifications to the loom files.



The first is for the parrot image (originally shown here) and the second is for an image of a sunset on the California coast. Here's the image, after processing in Photoshop and indexing to 11 hues, as shown in the color chips at the bottom of the image - 4 values of gold, 4 values of orange, 2 values of a bronzy brown, plus black.



After the sample, I've decided to use a more intense gold and a less intense orange. Both are available in the stash - no delay for dyeing the necessary colors.

In between weaving small strips, I'm winding the mint-green cotton yarn for the towel warp onto cones:



The cone winder (aka AVL pirn winder with adapters for cones) is on the corner of the worktable beyond the loom. The winder doesn't like to wind more than one skein onto cones at a time. There's enough resistance that the motor overheats, and after one skein, the motor is too hot to touch. So I just go away and do something else for a while to give it a chance to cool down.