New digital SLR, cashmere coat

I FINALLY got around to playing with my new digital SLR today, with help from Mike (who, being a techno-wizard, had already worked his way through the entire manual figuring out how to make it sit up and do tricks).  After a brief period of complete intimidation, I finally got it set up on a tripod, pointed it at my loom, and started shooting photo after photo to see what this gizmo and that whirligig did.

Here is my favorite of the photos:

Here I was playing with aperture size; I think I got a good slight blurriness in foreground and background.  And LOOK!!!  The colors are true!!  I can finally stop apologizing for the camera!

So, in that spirit, here is (finally!) a decent photo of the work on my loom:

In other news, I have dyed the yarn for the cashmere coat samples.  The red is a rich shade between garnet and maroon, the black is, well, black.  The cashmere-mohair yarn is not as prickly as I’d have expected from the mohair, and has much of the softness of cashmere – I’m seriously considering ordering more from the eBay seller, as it was only about $30/lb.  But first I want to see how it weaves up!

There are going to be four yarns in this cashmere coat: the warp will be 2/12 silk and a roughly 2500 ypp yarn consisting of 6 strands of 60/2 silk plied together.  The weft will be two strands of a 7000 ypp cashmere-mohair blend and 1 strand of 2/28 merino wool.  Those are basically the yarns I had lying around and which I wanted to use up.  I would have used pure cashmere/mohair but didn’t have enough of it, so added the merino.

Together they have a wonderfully soft “hand”.  I’m going to warp up for a sample 8″ wide and 4 yards long (I think that’s the shortest sample I can wind on my AVL warping wheel without moving all the bobbins).  It should be long enough for a scarf if I feel so inclined – will be lovely, if I wind up having the extra yarn to do it.  However, first things first: I need to weave up and wet-finish my samples before I decide what to do with the “leftovers”!