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You are here: Home / All blog posts / Phoenix progress
Previous post: Second draft of phoenix design
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December 12, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Phoenix progress

I spent most of yesterday converting the phoenix image to a loom-ready draft. I initially tried the easy path – using Arahweave’s automatic weave generator to convert the image, as Dusan suggested in the comments – but wasn’t happy with the results, so I did a more detailed conversion on my own. I started by putting together a weave blanket, sampling 63 combinations of warp and weft:

weave blanket for phoenix piece
weave blanket for phoenix piece

Then I took the above photo into Photoshop, where I created a palette of swatches by using the Eyedropper Tool to sample the photo, averaging an 11 pixel radius to arrive at a consistent color. I then had Photoshop index the file to the 63 colors in the weave blanket. Finally, I took the indexed file into Arahweave and matched all 63 colors with the appropriate weave structure. I might have been able to get by with fewer colors, but the end result looks fantastic, so I’m glad I went to the effort of doing all 63 structures.

Here’s a pic of the samples I wove:

sample for phoenix piece
sample for phoenix piece

This sample came out quite well. I wove short pieces of several sections, checking for technical issues. In the largest section, you can see that the aspect ratio is incorrect – the phoenix head came out slightly stretched vertically. Fortunately, in Arahweave, that’s a two-second fix – just one of its wonderful features. I found and fixed one spot where I had substituted an incorrect weave structure, and a few others where the color match was slightly off. I’ve also fixed a couple of other structural issues, such as making sure the two layers of the double weave are stitched together so they don’t slip against each other.

After wet-finishing and pressing the sample, I had planned to take out my mother’s beads and ribbons and experiment to see what kinds of embellishments would look good. Alas, all my best-laid plans came to naught. Here’s what the sample looked like about ten seconds after I brought out the beads.

Tigress "helping" with the embellishments
A helpful cat!

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: ma's memorial

Previous post: Second draft of phoenix design
Next post: The elusive circle

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