I’ve spent the last few days doing get-back-from-vacation cleanup: laundry, picking up the accumulated mail, adoring the cats (who are making up for lost time by demanding LOTS of attention), and so on. This will probably continue for a few days as we write thank you notes, restock the refrigerator, and clean up the amazing whirlwind of wedding debris.
This does not, however, mean I’ve been entirely idle. I’ve redone the photo book to include wedding photos, and sent a copy winging off to New Mexico for the Convergence exhibit. I’ve had a couple of long conversations with AVL about my compudobby ““ apparently all my problems were the result of massive heat buildup in the dobby box. So Mike and I will be upgrading the fans and installing a thermometer in the box to make sure this isn’t an issue in the future.
I’ve also joined a dye study group! This one is led by Karren Brito (author of the book Shibori: Creating Color and Texture on Silk) and will be about using the Munsell color system to mix up specific colors. A description of the group is on Weavolution, if anyone is interested in joining. This promises to be great fun. More dye samples!
Plans for the next few days:
- Dye a preliminary sample set for a red-to-yellow color gradient. This will be 30 colors x 20g each on a pale gray 55/45 cashmere/silk yarn, but I’m doing my samples on white 30/2 silk so they’ll be more broadly applicable later. I expect this to take me probably 2-3 days.
- Wind more 30/2 silk onto cones so they can be skeined into 5g skeins for my dye study group.
- Once my dobby box gets back, thread up the blue/gold warp.
- Buy more powerful fans for the dobby box, and get Mike to help me wire them up.
I can hardly wait to get weaving on this warp! It will probably be a week at least before I’m ready to weave (in addition to threading, I need to sample and then dye 30 skeins of yarn for the red to yellow color gradient), but the simulations have been so exciting that I can’t wait to see the Real Thing!
Finally, I’ll leave you with one more wedding photo that I got from the photographer”¦one of my favorites!
Fans are a good idea; you might also consider drilling an array of holes in the dobby box housing. We’ve done that with the housing on a PC I used on the dobby loom – it would overheat and just stop running. Imagine a Victorian lady fanning herself on an elegant setee. Because it was mounted on the top castle of the loom, in a room that tended to be hot, it got the benefit of all that hot air up toward the ceiling… The extra holes in the housing really helped. Mike probably used a dremel tool or maybe just an ordinary drill. With the housing removed from the box, of course.
p.s. Nice picture – no wonder you like it!