Weeks of preparation in planning, systems upgrades, assembly, warping, threading and more and it finally came down to weaving – 4 weeks from the day the loom lumbered into my house piece by piece.
Unbelievably caught unawares, I decided to weave a pile of rubber bands that I manipulated in Photoshop and then converted the image into something I could weave in Adacad. More on the process in another post.
The end result of the design process is a bitmap image that the loom software interprets, pixel by pixel, row by row as either lift (black) or don’t lift (white). The image is loaded into the thread control software (the TC in TC2) and in moments you are weaving.
Here is what a piece of the image looks like for this draft.
In the software you can color the wefts to help make it a little easier to see the pattern and to keep track of which weft you should be throwing. A reminder, my warp is alternating black and white for double weave (the diagram below shows all red warp). I used black (shown as black) and white (shown as yellow) weft. When white is on top and weaving with white warp threads the color looks light orange in the image below. When black is on top and weaving with black threads the color looks dark orange. Dithery colored areas are white weft on top woven on black warp threads.
Here’s what it looks like and sounds like when you are weaving. You don’t see the massive smile on my face, however.
You can see 6 threads on the left that are not weaving. I did not position the 1200 pixel draft image in the right place in my 1980 threads since I started 6 threads to the left of where I intended to… Anyway, easily resolved on the next design.
Here you see the loom and the laptop beyond. Remember that the laptop is connected to the loom with a network cable. You can connect the loom to your network and then manage it wirelessly. I may do that later.
And here is what it looks like as it rolls on to the cloth beam. The TC2 has auto advance of the warp so you are weaving at the same place every time. I am used to winding it on manually as I go so it feels a little bit like running in place while cloth magically forms beneath the loom.
There are a number of controls that let you adjust the tension and the distance the warp moves with every pic but I will get into that on another post.
Anyway. First weaving done. Cut off the loom, washed and pressed. I feel so lucky, energized and a little overwhelmed with the possibilities.
Thanks again to Digital Weaving Norway, Vibeke, Geetika and Cathryn who are making this experience both manageable and magical.