butterflies

I started sampling for the butterfly shawl today, trying out two background wefts:

1st samples of handwoven butterfly patterns in taquete

This is the “painted lady” butterfly, set on the diagonal.

I originally used a dark olive cashmere weft, thinking that the dullness of the color and the matte surface of the cashmere would set the butterflies off nicely. But it turned out to be too close in value to the black – you can see how it dulls down the color, too. So I tried a bright gold background weft, and that worked a little better, but I worry about how well it will work with a blue morpho butterfly, or a yellow tiger swallowtail – or a luna moth (pale green), for that matter. I am going to try a white background weft next – I think it will probably wash out the color, but I want to see it in action.

I have also completed a horizontally symmetric monarch butterfly:

horizontally symmetric monarch butterfly pattern for taquete

I have yet to weave this one up – will do that as soon as I get the background settled.

I am leaning towards a somewhat light-colored background right now, because the outlines of most butterflies are medium to dark. Put against a black background, they will blur and disappear. A lighter background would provide more contrast and hence make them more visible.

What next? I need to test the background with a wide range of colors, so I will abandon the orange-and-black butterflies for now. Over the next week or so, I plan to plot out a blue morpho butterfly, a luna moth, and a yellow swallowtail butterfly – possibly also a cecropia moth. Between those four and the monarch butterfly, they cover most color combinations of butterflies – yellow, blue, green, tan, and orange. (Isn’t it interesting that there are very few red or purple butterflies?) So it is looking like it will be awhile before I can launch into the actual shawl.

Meanwhile, I have decided to “get serious” about keeping notes. I have a bunch of undocumented samples running around, and after much consideration I have decided that I will NEVER get around to keeping a physical notebook of samples, complete with the drafts, notes, etc. associated with each sample. It’s simply too much of a pain to collect, print, etc. all that information. It’s also inefficient. With some of my treadling repeats 2000 picks long, it will be functionally impossible to reproduce the sample from the printed draft, anyway.

So what to do? OneNote to the rescue!

Here is the electronic “notebook” I am keeping for my samples, using Microsoft OneNote (click for the full-sized version):

As you can see from the top tab, this is the Projects portion in my Weaving notebook, in the Butterflies section. This section contains two top-level pages and three subpages (see tabs at right). There’s a Concept page (not shown) that talks about what I am trying to achieve with this project, and it’s got a Samples subpage where I’m sticking all the photos of the samples. Then there’s a Butterflies page that lists all the species of butterfly I’m trying to weave up. It has subpages for each butterfly motif I’m weaving.

Pictured on the page is the “Monarch diagonal” subpage. You can see the original photo, and the screenshot of the mini version. More importantly, there are three files on the page: the draft, and the two Photoshop files used to create the drafts. (One is of the image, and the other is the image modified into a weavable liftplan.) These are the original files! OneNote lets you embed copies of files into your notebook, so they are preserved and instantly accessible from the notebook. So I have all the working files and all the information about this project neatly filed away in OneNote.

About the only thing OneNote will not do is handle physical samples. I plan to put photos into OneNote, and attach a tag to each sample that references the corresponding OneNote workbook section. I think that should cover things pretty nicely, and store the important data – the electronic bits – very neatly and accessibly.

I’ve started collecting butterflies for my butterfly shawl. This is a slow and laborious process wherein I search for butterfly photos on the Internet, find a couple that show the markings clearly, and use them to draw the butterfly, pixel by pixel, in Photoshop. So far I’ve done a painted lady and a monarch butterfly, both drawn on the diagonal:

Not bad, considering the limited number of pixels I’m working with (max of 18 wide for the diagonal butterflies, 40 wide for the vertically symmetric ones). I will probably do a second of the monarch, this one vertically symmetrical and larger, because it’s a big and very recognizable butterfly that would benefit from a little more detail.

The one problem I foresee is that I may run out of big, clearly recognizable butterflies. How many can you name? A couple types of swallowtails, monarch, painted lady, the luna moth of course, and the blue morpho are the ones which pop into my mind. This is not enough to do a 78″ shawl (my usual length), so I’m going to have to do some searching to find other showy butterflies/moths. I may also do some caterpillars! Some caterpillars are quite bright, and it would add a whimsical touch to the shawl. And despite its name as a pest, the sphinx moth is really pretty during its larval stage. (It’s also known as the tomato hornworm – a striking, HUGE green and white caterpillar which will, unfortunately, also chow rapidly through your tomato plants.)

Anyway, this is apt to be a long project, as it takes about half an hour to an hour to convert an individual butterfly, and the diagonal butterflies will wind up only about an inch long when woven. The big, vertically symmetric butterflies will be bigger – maybe two inches – but I expect it will take about 50-60 butterflies and caterpillars to finish out the shawl. I would really like to weave a shawl with no repeats, because I think it would be neat, but if I start getting bored (or run out of butterfly types) I might just make the shawl symmetrical, in which case it would only take about 25-30 butterflies.

At any rate, I plan to convert these files to five-shuttle taquete weaves and try weaving them up as samples. When it comes to the shawl, I’m just going to “wing it” without weaving a test of the design, because each of the butterflies are different. (You could call the entire shawl a butterfly sampler!) I expect it will probably take about 2 months to design and weave the butterfly shawl (especially since about half my free time is currently devoted to drawing exercises), so this will be a slow project – but worth it, I hope!