Weaverly

A Booklover's Trio

Thank you, Jim, for sending me the link to this video. Be sure to stay for the summing-up at the end. It will make you smile (or maybe cry). 

In the studio, we're at work on another collaboration. Bruce assembled a collection of photographs called Rain, Fog & Ice, printed it on an Epson printer, and I'll be binding it after the covers dry (they were pasted up this morning). So far it's an edition of two; the covers are different. I can't stand to do the same thing twice. I guess that's why I'm not a production weaver.

 

And how do you get comfortable when reading a good book? Perhaps like this.

Emergence of the Water Tower

I've finally gotten to the top of the water tower. I'm just tickled that it came out round. Yes, that's a broken warp thread on the left. The only one so far. Much better than the previous warp (AKA The Warp From Hell). Here's a closeup.

 

And just for fun, the journal page I scanned it from:

 

On to the Department of How Much Is Too Much. Tony's holiday displays are the talk of the neighborhood. Actually, people drive here from miles around to see his displays every December. This year he started at Halloween, and after his Halloween displays came down he was ready with Thanksgiving, and this week his Santas & reindeer et al are in place. People, this is such hard work to produce! And I can't imagine what his electric bills are like. Nevertheless, when the sun goes down his yard is a magical place. I'll try to get some good nighttime photos for you. Meanwhile, here it is in mid-afternoon. The Ho Ho Ho on the roof is timed to blink sequentially. Animation aficionados take note.

A Cool Animation

As you may know, I love books and animation in equal measure. That's why I found this video irresistible. 

Unless you have a very fast connection, it's best to let the whole thing load before starting it. Some of my favorite books are here, including Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and Tash Aw's "The Harmony Silk Factory."

 

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Doggies

I'm working on another file with the wonderful 6-end false satin structure. It gives such good contrast! The drawings are even simpler this time. I've beefed up the horizontal lines, so that they don't disappear into the cloth. No cheating with the marker pen on this one.

 

 

On another topic -- be sure to check out Terry's blog for a fascinating documentation of a collaboration in progress. You might even want to bookmark this one, as I'm sure it's going to get even more interesting as it progresses. The artists' commentaries are inspiring.

Woven Drawings

For a try at interpreting a black and white drawing with no gray tones, I've chosen the same 6-end false satin structures beloved of damask drawloom weavers. 

This weave in my example is not balanced; the warp of black 20/2 cotton comes out to an actual 62.8 epi, and my 10/2 white cotton weft, lightly beaten (stirred, not shaken! Sorry, Mr. Fleming) measures 34 ppi, therefore the aspect ratio is approximately .54. After resizing my file, the cloth is looking like this:

 

There is pretty good contrast between the black and the white areas with this yarn/sett combination, which is just what I want.

The only surprise is that after resizing, the horizontal dividers, originally two pixels high, are now one pixel high, and are completely hidden on the front side. So I've gone in with a black finepoint magic marker and a straightedge, and drawn the horizontal lines on the cloth. Sh-h-h. Please don't tell anyone.

Back at Work

It's hard to get back into the routine after a vacation, but after going through a week's accumulation of mail, I made an honest attempt. This is a series of images based on a sequence of Elizabeth feeding the chickens. It's so altered that you can hardly recognize actual objects. I hope that after completion the idea will come into focus.

 

On the drive back from Miami we listened to a wonderful audiobook, Steig Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It's so sad to realize Larsson died before the book's publication and never knew of the its success. This version is narrated by Simon Vance, a talented reader who imparts each character with his/her own voice, and even pronounces all the Swedish proper nouns correctly. 

An Animation to Savor, and a New Website

When pixels are your raw material, you tend to notice other grid-based art forms (in addition to weaving!). This fascinating video uses Post-It notes on a grid.

 


And for a change of pace, please take a look at the beautiful new website of my friend Margaret Roach Wheeler. Margaret is a hugely talented weaver, savvy businesswoman, and very nice person. 

Back to the Loom

It feels good to be throwing the shuttle again. Work is inching along on the portrait. It's amazing how well you get to know someone when you look at 38 iterations of him up close.

A funny thing about the little camera I carry around in my pocket is that it has face recognition; whenever it senses that the subject matter in front of the lens has a human face, it insists on focusing on that. With the picture above, it's appropriate. But sometimes the camera finds "faces" in the oddest things. Last week I tried to photograph a half-full laundry bag hanging from a nail in the wall, and the camera told me it was a face. Maybe it knows something I don't know. Kinda like finding the Pope in the pizza.

And speaking of cameras, Bruce has put together a really gorgeous collection of photos from rural Virginia. Take a look here.

Mike 38 Frames

I'm in the prep stages of a new jacquard weaving. This one incorporates portraits, so the aspect ratio must be accurate. The piece was designed with a balanced weave (epi=ppi). I wove a test strip, and found that with these particular yarns the actual woven epi is 64 and ppi is 48, therefore the woven aspect ratio is .75. 

So I went back to the original layered file with weaves applied as layer styles, resized it, flattened it, and saved it as a tif to send to the loom. It should look right now.

Process Art

My friend Terry has a wonderful new blog, and her documentation of her work processes is fantastic. The May 5 post is especially good, and all of us who find it helpful to document the way we work should read it. She has a good summary of Process Art as an artistic movement, then takes us through the steps of creating one of her art quilts, then concisely states her observations and evaluation. Masterful!

On a completely different topic…in a catalog that arrived in my mailbox, I found the following product, de rigueur for animation geeks. It's a camera you plant in the ground to film your growing plants for time lapse videos. No, I'm not getting one, tho' I can't help but wonder…

Can't sign off without a picture. Same one as yesterday, pushed a little more. Weave-ready? Maybe.