I finished my Mandelbrot piece! It was astonishingly easy compared to my usual projects – one or two hours of design, about four hours of weaving, and I was done. Amazing Grace is magic! I’m tempted to put a license plate on her that says GEN II (the license number for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).
One thing I found interesting was the difference between a piece freshly off the loom and a piece that has been wet-finished. The difference in this piece was quite dramatic: In the wet-finished version, the warp relaxed and the wefts drew in together a little bit. This created much more intense colors.
Here are two photos of the finished piece. The top photo is the piece before wet finishing, and the bottom photo is the piece after wet-finishing. Neat, huh?
(There is a shadow on the bottom of the pre-wet-finishing piece (that was my camera), so look at the rest of the piece when comparing.)
Marvelous Mandelbrot is 9.25″ x 9.5″ and will be sold for $125 at Fiber Shots, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles‘ annual fundraising gala. It’s on July 22, 2017, 6 pm to 9 pm at the Museum. (The Museum is 520 S. First Street, San Jose.) Come, enjoy seeing all the work, and buy something for yourself!
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Magic in the Water! 😉
Exactly! 🙂
What did you use for warp & weft (fiber content)? Just curious.
And how did you program the loom to weave this?
And it should go for more that $125! It is amazing!
(I still vote for fractals!)
Warp is 80/2 silk/cashmere yarn (which is misbehaving, I may replace it), weft is rayon embroidery thread.
Programming the loom was easy. Jacquard weaving is basically paint by numbers (each number represents a structure), so I set up 28 weave structures to get the shading I wanted (this is very quick and easy in my weaving software, Arahweave), reduced the original image to 28 colors, plugged it into Arahweave to do the paint-by-number conversion, and presto! A weave-ready file. (The TC-2 reads a bitmap image to figure out what warps should be up or down – a black pixel = up, a white pixel = down.)
Hmm, that sounds a bit complicated. It’s not; the whole process took maybe 2 hours.
Actually, it doesn’t sound complicated at all. I found it interesting that color = weave structure in your plan.
Is the Arahweave a commercially available program?
Yes, it is. It’s Linux-based, but I’m running it in a virtual machine on Windows using VMWare. http://www.arahne.si/
It’s not cheap (1000 Euros for the 2048 x 2048-thread version, back in 2015), and it has a substantial learning curve, but OMG, is it powerful. I couldn’t possibly create the kinds of things I’m creating without it. It’s almost as amazing as Amazing Grace!
Very cool. And so fast, too!
Great piece! Fascinating to see the “magic in the water.” $125.00? Mmmmm, not enough. Not nearly enough.
I would love to buy it. Must I wait until the gala?
Alas, yes. It will only be on sale at the gala, though if you can’t make it there is the potential for a phone order after the first hour of the gala. (Though, truthfully, I expect it will sell before that, so it would probably be a good idea (and more fun!) to come to the gala!
I think you meant to move the decimal over one place – $1,250, this is so beautiful!!!!!
I agree with Anna. Don’t underprice your art. You know what went into it, heart, soul, mind, and body! Surely, you are worth more!
I love fractals. Do you know Ultrafractal? It is inexpensive and a lot of fun to use in designing. Your weaving certainly worked!
OMG! This is the coolest program ever, Rosie. Thanks so much for pointing it out to me – I downloaded it and will definitely be using this in my work!!