Weaverly

We Are Home

Finally back home after a wonderful look at Alaska's inside passage. There are no words big enough to describe the experience, but here are a few pictures (click to view any of these full size). The puny messages & snapshots I tried to post from my mobile phone fell way short of the mark. Thanks to all who hung in there anyway (Trisha, the sign on the shop in Skagway reads: LOOM; and I think it's simply amazing that fellow blogger Kimberly was in roughly the same place at the same time and following along). On our small boat Spirit of Alaska with 48 other travelers we experienced a storm (12 ft. seas!), watched (and listened to) whales just a few feet away, saw multiple glaciers up close and watched them calve, visited a tiny fishing village, and made sightseeing stops at Sitka and Skagway (where we rode a narrow gauge railway to White Pass Summit). We enjoyed a staggering array of wildflowers, and spent a congenial week with the some of the most intelligent and friendly folks I have ever met. Whoo-ee!

 

Skagway, AK

Note name of store on left. Having a rare sunny day.

Sitka

After a storm & a rough passage we are here. Looking forward to a day off the boat!

Mendenhall Glacier

So Many Greens

Weather here in Juneau is gray and drizzly, but nothing can dampen my mood now that my luggage has arrived. Actually, the overcast skies produce some incredibly saturated colors. Here is a photo from yesterday's walk atop Mt. Roberts. So many blues and greens on one branch!

Today we visit the Mendenhall Glacier, and this evening we board the Spirit of Alaska to cruise the Inner Passage. Until the next port, no phones, no internet, no Olympics, no blog. Instead: whale watching, knitting, Ferroll Sams.

Beginnings

Things have not gone exactly according to plan. In Seattle, we learned that our flight to Juneau was cancelled because of volcanic eruptions (all flights to SE Alaska were cancelled). We were able to book a new flight for this morning, but the first attempt at landing was aborted due to foggy conditions, and the pilot said he'd try one more time, otherwise he would go to Sitka. The second try was successful. We arrived in Juneau, but our luggage did not. 

But darn, these bears are on vacation, so we took a tram ride to the top of Mt. Roberts, and saw this most beautiful sight:

We did some walking among the abundant wildflowers on a trail high above the harbor, and our spirits are restored. Now if the luggage arrives by tomorrow, we will be content.

En Route

It's been a long day. One more leg to go. Reading Ferrol Sams has helped pass the time. It's too bad the planes don't have such interesting upholstery any more. No weaves to analyze!

Hooray! Hooray!

Back in the early seventies, our favorite family book was Bears' Vacation by the Berenstains. I am happy to see it's still in print, and deservedly so. It's a great book, and the illustrations are adorable. The kids knew it by heart, and every time we set off on vacation, we would recite the beginning verse, "Hooray! Hooray! We're on our way! Our summer vacation starts today!" Even after the boys grew up, we still recited it at the beginning of every trip. 

I'll be out of range of email for a while. I'm going to try blogging via my mobile phone. I don't know how well this will work, but we'll see. I'm always up for a challenge. Hooray! Hooray!

Gamma and Reverse Side

The first of the G-series is completed, and I've decided to rename this group Gamma—easier to search for on the computer, and a bit classier. The first photo shows it going around the breast beam on its way to the cloth beam, and the second photo shows the reverse side (and a humongous dust bunny—don't tell). I find the reverse side interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, as with all double-weave fabrics, you tend to get a negative image with some surprise colorations; and second, the reverse side shows the looser twill interlacement of the bottom layer of my warp tapestry weaves. 

Creating a Networked Threading in Photoshop®

For this example let's assume a 48-end repeat for an 8-shaft loom, and a 4x4 initial. Illustrations have been enlarged 8-x for clarity; click to make full size. Start with a background colored in with bands 8 pixels high.

On a new white layer, transparency set to 50%, with black foreground color, and the pencil tool, 1 pixel size, draw a pattern line.

With white as the foreground color, clean the line up so that there is no more than 1 pixel per vertical column.

Bring the opacity back up to 100%. Delete the white pixels. 

Using the colored bands on the background as a guide, cut and paste 8-pixel sections of the pattern line and sandwich them on top of each other, to accomplish the telescoping operation. 

Restore the white pixels to the background and crop.

Copy black pixels to a new layer and wrap the new layer up one pixel (Filter>Other>Offset). Do this two more times, and flatten. This gives you a ribbon 4 pixels high.

Create a 4-pixel x 4-pixel file with the following initial, save it as a pattern preset.

Select the black pixels in your ribbon file and fill them with the initial pattern you have just created.

And there is your networked threading! Rotate it 90 degrees, copy it, paste it into the treadling area of your weaving program, enter any threading, turn the draft, and the networked threading is now in your weaving file.

Thank you, Ruth, for pointing out that Marg Coe has already figured this out independently. Her method is probably different from mine. The question now arises: why bother to do this at all in Photoshop when there are so many weaving programs that do networked threadings more efficiently? Answer: One never knows when a new procedure might be useful for some unknown future purpose. The intellectual challenge of figuring something out is its own reward. And finally, the freedom of drawing and manipulating pixels in Photoshop gives us patterns which might not occur to us in other software. So I'm filing this one away for another day.

For more information on network drafting, networks, initials, ribbons, telescoping, etc., go here.