I can weave again! Not for long periods yet, but my elbow tendon finally seems to be healing up. I have been weaving in 15-20 minute intervals once or twice a day for the last few days, and all seems to be going well. Thank goodness!
Now that I can weave again, I’ve been creating samples for the AI tiger piece.
I started by dyeing the weft yarns. I’m using a beautiful brushed mohair yarn, with a silk core and kid mohair fluff. Gorgeous stuff, but it only came in white.
I fixed that!
I also dyed a skein of black silk/mohair yarn, but it turned out to be really hard to get a good photo of it. Kinda like Fritz, who turns into a black furry blob when photographed.
After dyeing and rewinding the skeins, I wove the sample blanket for the tiger. Here it is, just off the loom:
What’s a sample blanket? It’s a way of sampling all the colors you plan to use in your piece. First you weave a swatch of each structure you are considering using. Then you take a photo and do a little Photoshop magic to figure out the average color of each swatch, like this:
Next, you go through the swatch collection and remove all the swatches that are essentially duplicates of each other. For example, in the bottom row there are two nearly identical grays and a third one that’s only marginally darker. Removing the duplicates makes it easier to match up colors to weave structures later.
(The white swatch at the very end of the first set is a special, experimental one that I added later. More on that in a bit.)
Once you’ve done that, you tell Photoshop to reduce the image to ONLY those colors found in the swatch set. So with my original image:
gets turned into this image:
The woven piece won’t look exactly like either image, mostly because Photoshop’s assessment of the average color of a swatch doesn’t reflect how the human eye actually sees color. So I don’t worry about minor problems as long as the image overall looks about right.
However, there’s something bothering me in this image, which is that there really isn’t a white. There’s a light-to-medium gray, but I want a brighter white than I can get with the samples I’ve currently woven. I know two different ways to get a lighter color, one that’s truer to white, so I decided to add a “white white” to the swatches. I figured that if it worked, I could explore those options more thoroughly.
And I like the result much better:
(If you’re wondering where the cyborg half of the tiger went, by the way, I’ll be adding circuit boards and “circuitry” to the right side after weaving. I wanted to weave the entire white-tiger half to give me the most options for adding circuitry later.)
I still have to weave more samples and noodle on exactly how I’m going to achieve that white, but I’m definitely making progress!
In other news, I’m getting ready to harvest about 60 bulbs of garlic. I decided to rotate out tomatoes from my larger garden plot this year, so I planted three varieties of garlic instead, and am only growing eight or nine tomato plants in the small plot. That includes one F1 cross (hybrid) that I think will produce some verrrry interesting results next year, and also includes a few more tomatoes that I’d like to breed. So tomatoes are minimal this year, but will be back in full force next year. And I expect to be giving away a lot of garlic soon!
Once the garlic’s harvested, I’ll plant sweet potatoes. We have a super long growing season (it frosts once or twice in January and that’s it) so I think I can get sweet potatoes this year, even with a late start.
And our roses are going gangbusters. Here’s just one bouquet of the fragrant beauties.
Finally, no blog post would be complete without a cat. Or, in this case, two cats.
Fritz and Tigress are just about eleven years old now (time flies!), and they’ve definitely slowed down, but they are still very much the rulers of the household. I spend all my free time brushing Tigress when she demands it (about eighteen times a day), giving Fritz belly rubs when he wants them (about twenty-six times a day), and generally catering to feline demands. Such is the life of a human!
