Five hours of unremitting labor today produced this:
That’s the fine-tuned sample. The first few hours of work looked quite different:
Even with all the care I took in threading and sleying, a lot of debugging was needed. (Count the pins in the photo if you don’t believe me.) Then I had to fix the aspect ratio – I was using a superfine reeled silk thread, which collapsed the phoenixes into squat little blobs. I doubled the length of the image, and got the lovely phoenixes in the final sample.
I’m still troubleshooting a number of things – for one thing, I’m getting unsightly loops in the tabby warps. I’m guessing this is because the tabby warp is too loose compared to the pattern warp, so I need to adjust the tension further. But I’ve made tremendous progress, and things are actually working quite well. Aside from setting up and debugging, I’ve woven over a thousand picks today. Believe it or not, each of the longer phoenixes is about 280 picks! That’s what happens when you weave with such fine yarns.
OK. Now off to do all the things that I should have been doing!
Oh. Wow!!! That is gorgeous and amazing beyond all words. I’m sitting here with my mouth hanging open. I may have to eat one of your chocolates to stop the drooling. Seriously, that may be the most amazing bit of weaving I’ve ever seen!
How beautiful. My daughter (16) is adopted from China. The firt part of her name, Feng, means phoenix. If I ever get an AVL, I’m going to bug you for the set up for this.
Oh, so worth all of the work. It is unbelievably beautiful!