Following the double-happiness draft, I started thinking of other things that could be done with Asian symbols.  I remembered that I have a book full of Japanese heraldic crests, which are typically round in shape, stylized, and quite beautiful.  Just the sort of thing that would work well in weaving!

Since I didn’t have the book with me (we fly home tomorrow), I went looking on the Internet, and found a site with lots of Japanese crests.  (They are not copyrighted, so can be used freely.)  I picked out this one:

It’s symmetric, so I could weave half of it on 24 shafts and use a point threading to create the second half.

Reserving four shafts to fill in spaces between the motifs, I shrank the image down to 40 pixels wide (twice times 20 shafts), and cut it in half:

Then I experimented with fills.  I realized quickly that any pattern fill would be reversed when I used the point threading.  I tried diagonal lines of twill, but the reversal in the middle of the symbol was very distracting.  Satin would produce very long floats where the pattern reversed.  So I finally settled on broken twills:

Because there are no strong diagonals, it could be reversed without calling too much attention to the reversals; because the max float length in a broken twill is 3, reversing it would produce only 5-thread floats, which at my usual sett is only about 1/8″.

So I saved the file as a .bmp, opened it as a sketchpad file in Fiberworks PCW, and cut and pasted from the sketchpad to the liftplan, producing this finished draft:

It’s a pretty draft, I hope to weave it up someday.  Especially since it’s on a fairly simple threading, I could thread up with a point threading and try doing many different crests.  I’d make them as Christmas gifts for the relatives, but I’m not sure how Chinese relatives would feel about getting Japanese crests, given the long history between China and Japan!

So far I haven’t done anything particularly advanced with the Woven Pixel techniques, but I hope to delve into the chapters on doubleweave someday.  Perhaps once I get back!

I couldn’t sleep this morning (my body wakes me up at 5-6am regardless of when I went to sleep) so I decided to play around with drafts while waiting for everyone else to get up.  I started playing with a very blocky double-happiness symbol, thinking that would be easier to manage:

It’s a symmetric design, which means that instead of using 24 shafts for the whole symbol, I could use 24 shafts for half the symbol and just repeat it, enabling me to make the symbol larger, about 48 threads wide.  At my typical sett (40-45 epi) that would be just over an inch wide, easily large enough to read.

However, I quickly decided I didn’t like the blocky look.  It didn’t have any of the organic flow that I associate with Chinese calligraphy, and I thought it was just plain ugly.

So I grabbed a prettier version from the Internet:

I chose this image in part because I liked the calligraphy, but primarily because it would cut in half gracefully.  To capture the calligraphic image in an attractive manner, I needed as many shafts as I could get, and cutting it in half would effectively double the number of shafts I could use.

Then (following Alice Schlein’s Woven Pixel techniques) I reduced the cut-in-half version to an image about 30 pixels wide and 60-odd pixels tall, figuring I could fiddle with the long horizontal stroke to reduce the number of shafts later:

Following Bonnie’s advice, I decided to fill in the foreground with long floats (to accentuate the symbol, since long floats catch the eye) and the background with short floats.  So, following Alice’s techniques, I used Photoshop to fill in the character with an eight-shaft satin pattern and the background with a four-shaft broken twill.

I made some other adjustments (mostly removing long floats and “cleaning up” the image) and finally arrived at this:

Notice how I crammed the two images together in the threading to produce the double-happiness symbol, and repeated the plain broken twill to space the double-happiness symbols apart.

I’m very pleased with the resulting draft.  Thank you, Alice, for writing The Woven Pixel!  It’s a really powerful technique that’s allowing me to do some very interesting things with imagery.