Sampling on the Jacquard Loom

I've got quite a few images queued up for the jacquard loom. Today when I finished weaving the hem of the most recent towel, I decided to switch looms and weave the samples that will help me get the aspect ratio of the jacquard images right, so I dug yarns out of the stash and wove 1 inch each of 2 images.

The first image is of an old-growth rainforest in British Columbia.



For this image, I wanted to use 3 weft colors - green, beige, and medium tan. I didn't have the right set of colors in 16/2 cotton or bamboo/rayon, so I thought I might try 2 strands of 20/2 cotton together. I wound 3 pirns, each with two close-but-not-exactly-the-same-hue yarns. That weft combination might work if I opened up the sett of the loom quit a bit, but at the current 45 epi, the yarn doesn't beat down closely enough. This results in cloth that looks too dark, because too much of the black warp shows through between the weft shots. The forest was dimly lit, but not that dark! The problem is, while changing the sett on the loom is easy, it does require that I resley the reed (a different reed...) and re-tie onto the apron; I decided I was not in the mood for that, so I'll try another sample with the 20/2 used singly instead of doubled to see if that works better. Otherwise, I'll get out the dyepots and dye some 16/2 cotton in the colors I want...

The second image is a bamboo grove that I wove once already (but when the loom had only 960 hooks, not 1440) and it only needs two weft colors - gold and olive green, both of which I've already got in stock.



Here are the two samples (rainforest on the bottom and bamboo above it, with the bamboo wefts in the shuttles:



For the second image, the sample looks pretty close to what I want, and all that's needed is to resize the file slightly, stretching it a little bit vertically. Then I'm ready to go.