I blitzed through Phoenix #4 in just three days! On Day One, I skeined, dyed, and dried four colors of weft yarn, and wound the skeins onto cones and thence to pirns. I also fixed the erroneous warp section that felled the third phoenix. On Day 2, I got up early, scampered over to the loom, wove 1,000+ picks…and then realized that the aspect ratio was wrong – the image was coming out elongated because of changes in the weft density. Nothing could be done to fix it. I’d just have to redo it. So I adjusted the draft and started over. I got through about 1,700 picks (about 1/3 of the phoenix) before my eyes started crossing and I had to quit for the day. And then I finished the remaining 3600 picks today. Whee!
Today I also experimented with a new toy. I wanted to videotape my weaving technique so I could see what I was doing right and what I was improving. So I bought a tripod for my iPhone and shot some fun videos. Here’s one of me weaving with four shuttles:
(If you have an email subscription, you’ll need to click the link at the top of the email to view the post in your browser. For some reason the video links don’t come through in the emails.)
And here are two time-lapse videos of me weaving the phoenix, from two different angles:
And, finally, a video of me weaving, seen from the side:
And here, just for the sake of having a photo, is a still shot of the nearly-complete phoenix.

And what do the cats think of all this? Yawn.
