Sampling Luna

The next piece on the jacquard loom is based on a photo of our moon from the NASA image archive. This is a commission for a friend, another weaver whose spouse is an astronomy buff and will receive the weaving as a Christmas gift.

I've woven the image before, back when the loom had only 960 hooks, using 10-end shaded satins with a white weft on the black warp. Since I had to resize the image to weave on 1,440 hooks, I took the time to sample two sets of weaves.

The first set of weaves is the original 10-end shaded satins; in the photo below you can see the one-inch sample I wove first. The second set is again 10-end shaded satins, but this time using two wefts, one white and one black. The black weft is on the face of the cloth weaving 1/9 satin only in the areas that have the darkest value in the image; the rest of the time, it's weaving 9/1 satin so it stays mostly on the reverse of the cloth.

You can see how well the black weft in the second sample covers up the white pixels that show when using only one weft, allowing for greater contrast between the darkest value and the lightest, and making the outline of the moon much more dramatic.

What I found very interesting was the difference in the way the wefts beat in. I wove the two samples one right after the other, so the force of the beat should be virtually identical. In the first sample, it took 57 picks to complete one inch of weaving. In the second sample, it took 89 picks. Before I begin the piece, I need to increase the height of the image to account for the difference in ppi vs. epi (48, in this case). Hi, Ho, Hi, Ho, it's off to weave I go!