By weaving like a madwoman, I finished weaving “Ode to Joy” in time for my friend Joy’s memorial service. It came out beautifully!

The six motifs around the edges of the red-and-gold eternity knot represent things that were important to Joy:

• rainbow heart for gay rights
• triquetra knot for spirituality and her magical work
• Spinning wheel to represent her love for spinning and knitting
• High Priestess Tarot card – she was a gifted Tarot reader and often associated with the High Priestess
• scorpion for her astrological work (she was a Scorpio)
• Time Lord symbol (Gallifreyan) – because she was a fervent Dr. Who fan.

The four animals in white and gold in the center of the knot are Joy’s spirit animal (bear), the spirit animals of her two partners (African wild dog and Chinese dragon), and her spirit mentor (white owl).

And of course the four photos in the corners were all of Joy, at various stages in her life.

I ran into a ton of technical challenges while weaving this piece…mostly having to do with the density of the weft (crosswise) threads. After weaving about half of the first picture, I realized that the images were badly stretched, winding up about 20% longer than they should have been. This was probably due to the red design in the center, which had a lot of interchanges between the blue and the red layers of fabric. The more changes between layers, the more difficult it is to pack the weft in – so a section with a lot of color changes will naturally come out more loosely woven than a section with fewer changes.

I thought a bit about how to correct this. I could have squished the remaining piece by 20%, but then the difference between the early portion and the later portions would be obvious. I couldn’t start over without wasting a lot of precious and irreplaceable thread. (The gold thread, remember, was made with real gold – I had bought it from a yarn shop liquidator and had no way of buying more.) I finally realized that the eternity knot that framed everything could be stretched without problems – so I could proceed by simply adjusting the motifs in each section to be 20% shorter.

Here are the motifs as they were fed to the loom:

And here’s how they looked after they were woven:

As you can see, they actually stretched a bit more than expected – the circle is slightly out of true – but on the whole, it came out very well. And the animals – bear, Chinese dragon, white owl, and African wild dog are wonderful and vivid. (The piece is even prettier in person…the camera doesn’t capture the glitter of the gold thread, or the richness and depth of the blue background.)

I’m very happy with the end result – I think it’s one of the best pieces I’ve created, and I think Joy would be proud. (And I can’t believe I went from initial sketch to finished work in just nine days!)

I spent all day yesterday weaving samples, mostly to see how the animal images would weave up. Here’s what I produced:

The bottom samples are from my initial attempt. As you can see, the owl now looks whiter than in the previous version, which is great! But the first African wild dog (left) looks a bit like a tall pig, and the dragon (right) is barely legible. So I decided to substitute a different dog photo, and to troubleshoot the dragon. An hour or two later, I had the design for the top sample. (The dragon, it turned out, was a colossally dumb mistake on my part: I had plugged in a 7-1 satin structure where I should have plugged in a 1-7 satin, reversing my colors so the brightest gold sections came out nearly black.)

I’m now satisfied with the animals. I don’t have time to weave more samples, as (per my calculations) it will take me about eight hours of weaving time to finish the 4,320 picks for the finished piece. That isn’t including time for all the fiddly stuff that needs to be done from time to time, so figure more like 10-11 hours for the finished piece. Since I don’t want to be weaving frantically all day Saturday, and I’ll have some finishing work to do after the piece is woven, that means I need to start weaving the final piece now.

To prepare for this, yesterday night I started winding the weft yarns onto bobbins. Two of the weft yarns are simple 10/2 cotton, and took about fifteen minutes to prepare. The third one is the real gold thread…and oy vey! It is a diva of yarns, and it sure knows it. It is a very unbalanced thread, meaning it’s prone to twisting back on itself, producing pigtails that are difficult to remove without damaging the yarn, because the surface is pretty rough and catches on itself. It’s basically a very fine, flat strip of paper (?) coated with gold and wrapped in a spiral around a tough core thread. So if it catches on itself, it’s easy to shift the wrapping gold thread, exposing the core thread, which of course you don’t want. It is a pain to work with, and absolutely the only reason I’m putting up with it is that it is (a) beautiful and (b) a fitting tribute for a good friend.

Because the gold thread is difficult to work with, the makers packaged it very carefully. It comes in small, tightly wrapped packages, each containing ten tiny skeins. The skeins are attached to each other at the top, so the package is actually one continuous thread, just wrapped into ten skeins. Each skein is carefully tied in two places with a twist of paper. Nobody in their right minds would package a cheap synthetic yarn this meticulously, so unless it’s a deliberate counterfeit (which I think is unlikely), it’s the real deal.

Here’s the package of yarn, neatly wrapped and tied:

And here’s a picture of the unwrapped skeins, showing how they’re joined at the tops:

The paper twists to the right are holding the opposite ends of the skein.

Of course, just to be difficult, the skeins are too small to be held on anything but a barely-open umbrella swift, and the umbrella swift keeps collapsing inward no matter how tightly I fasten it, requiring constant adjustment.

But looking at the result in the samples, it’s totally worth it. So I have been meticulously unwinding the skeins, and winding them onto tiny quills (thin paper cylinders, not goose feathers!) for use in my lone boat shuttle. The prima donna, of course, couldn’t possibly be satisfied with what I normally use, so I’m using a boat shuttle for the first time in years. (The yarn is twisty, springy, and inclined to knot back on itself, making it a nightmare in the end-feed shuttles I typically use.)

Off to weave!

I’ve spent the last few days getting everything set up to weave Joy’s memorial piece. It’s a complicated process. I started with this mockup:

But a mockup is not a file that can be read by a jacquard loom. There are (broadly speaking) three steps to creating an image the loom can use.

First, you create a mockup that contains what you would like to see in the finished piece. The image above is the mockup for Joy’s memorial piece.

Next, you create a cartoonish version of that mockup, using only a small set of colors. Each color will represent a single weave structure -a repeatable interlacement of threads. The colors may or may not have anything to do with the original mockup colors. In fact, I like to use radically different colors, because it makes the shades easy for me to distinguish. Here’s the 23-color cartoonish version of the mockup:

You’ll notice that there appear to be lots of shades of gray in the photos. There are actually only seven shades of gray, but they’re scattered to give the impression of more subtle shading. Similarly, there are only seven shades of aqua/black in the central animals.

Creating the “cartoon” file looks like it should be a straight-up conversion in Photoshop, but it often isn’t. For example, the orange and yellow lines of the eternity knot took a huge amount of tedious cleanup, because the original mockup had some shaded pixels at the boundaries that came out ragged in the cartoonish version. So I had to go in with a few more Photoshop tools and smooth out all the boundaries between the lines. That plus other cleanup took me four or five hours – definitely not as simple as it looks!

Once you have a suitable file, you need to load it into your weaving software and convert each colored pixel into the appropriate weave structure. Some people use Photoshop for this, but I use Arahweave, which is much more powerful. In Arahweave, you just load your cartoonish image, fire up the jacquard conversion window, and map each color to a weave structure. Simple, fast, and fun!

…once you’ve built the weave structures you plan to plug in, that is.

The weave structures for this particular piece were actually pretty complicated. While it’s not obvious on the surface, the piece is actually three layers of cloth, all woven at the same time. And the layers interchange. So designing a weave structure for this piece means designing all three layers of cloth, then combining the designs for each layer to produce a design representing how to weave all three layers at once. Figuring out all this in your head is the sort of thing that drives people out into the streets at midnight screaming uncontrollably about Cthulhu’s Second Coming.

Fortunately, I don’t have to! Arahweave does the heavy lifting for me. But it’s still complicated. I’m weaving with three warps (lengthwise colors): white, orange-red, and blue. I’m weaving with three wefts (crosswise colors): gold, red, and black. Any of those wefts can weave with any of those warps, so for any particular structure, I have to decide what warp/weft pair is on top, what warp/weft pair is in the middle, and which one is on the bottom. And how each of those pairs is interlacing. The possibilities are maddeningly complex.

Anyway, I spent most of the day yesterday cleaning up the “cartoon” image and designing weave structures. Last night, after much hard work, I finally got to the point of weaving samples. Here is the first sample, one of the middle sections:

The contrasting threads are to help me figure out proportions. Usually a design comes out a little denser or looser than you expected when designing in the software. Then you need to stretch or squoosh your cartoon image to compensate, so it looks right when woven. The top and bottom threads are 350 picks (crosswise threads) apart, and should (in theory) measure just shy of 4 inches for this particular combination of interlacing threads. In this case, I got lucky: the actual density was exactly the same as the expected density, so no adjustment was needed.

The contrasting threads also mark boundaries between versions of the weave files. For example, I didn’t like the bottom half of the owl, which was woven with the blue warp and the gold weft interlacing. I didn’t feel there was enough contrast, so I wove the top half using the blue warp interlacing with both the gold and the black weft simultaneously. This added more contrast to the owl. So the process of sampling is really a cycle: design, create the sample, evaluate the sample, identify changes that need to be made, and start designing your changes. (By the way, this process is covered in far  more detail in my book Master Your Craft.)

Because I needed to get feedback from Joy’s wives, Lena and Nyondo, I drove up to their place this morning to show it to them. They liked it! but wanted to know if it was possible to get more white into the owl. I initially didn’t think there was, but I got an idea on the way home. So tomorrow I will try swapping the blue warp for the white warp, and weaving the owl in white, gold, and black. It’s a good thing I have Arahweave to simplify the construction of each structure, or I’d probably have lost my mind by now.

I’m deeply enjoying this process, as complicated as it is. With the TC-2 jacquard loom and Arahweave, I feel I finally have the tools I need to express myself in handwoven cloth. I can come up with a meaningful design, solve the technical puzzles, and weave the samples and cloth for a major project – in just ten days! Now that I’m armed with the right tools, I feel like a total creative powerhouse. It’s like my early cycling days, when I switched from riding a clunky, heavy hybrid bike to a much lighter road bike, and went zipping around the first day shouting “I am a GOD!!!!” It felt SO good to be on something so fast and responsive – and that’s exactly how I feel with my jacquard loom and weaving software.

I’ve decided that my next piece will be a tribute to my friend Joy, to be shown at her memorial service. It’s a fairly ambitious design, featuring several photos of Joy , plus some of the things that were most important to her. I’m currently in the layout stage, making sure that all the images are correctly placed. I’m not entirely sure whether I can get good enough resolution on some of the more detailed images, so there will probably be other tweaks during the conversion process.

The difficult part is that the memorial service is next Sunday, so I have only nine days to finish the design, convert it to something weave-able, do the weaving, and finish it. I think I can do it, but it will be tight.

Here’s a rough draft of the piece:

It will be woven 29″ wide (finished width probably more like 27″). The blue background will feature the blue painted warp, the orange lines will be the orange warp. The yellow sections will be woven with threads made with real gold – though I have to check whether I’ll have enough to weave the entire piece.

Given that I have a piece with a tight timeline, it’s a good thing that I’m almost done with the loom prep! Here are some photos from the various stages.

First, a moment of panic halfway through tying the new warp to the old. Could this rat’s nest possibly be salvaged?

Well, sometimes a hopeless tangle turns out to be easier than you’d think to straighten out. This photo was taken about fifteen minutes later, after gently teasing the knots forward through the heddles and reed:

Still messy but no longer hopeless!

The second batch of knots went even more smoothly:

Since it was my first attempt at tying on, a few missed threads and un-done knots were only to be expected. Those took about three hours to fix, but here I am now, neatly arranged in front and back:

The next step will be debugging, so I’ll weave a short header and then some twills whose sole purpose is to reveal any errant threads. And after that, I’ll be ready to weave samples for the memorial piece!