It’s been a looooong time since I wove anything on Grace. Four and a half years, I think, since Bipolar Prison came off the loom. After that I rethreaded, wove some samples for a project that never came to fruition, and then gave up. And poor Grace just sat there for several years, because I was starting a business and didn’t have the time or the emotional energy to face rethreading AGAIN.

Then Ricki appeared, like manna in the wilderness, asking if anyone had a TC-2 and was willing to teach them how to design for and weave on a TC-2 in exchange for studio assistance. Hot dog! A deal was struck and we were both in business. Ricki threaded up Grace, working over the course of many months. Then we slowly worked our way through a number of mechanical issues, culminating in my shipping module #8 off to Norway for inspection and repair. (Each module controls one set of 220 threads. Grace has 12 modules, Maryam has 4.) The wonderful folks at Tronrud Engineering got it fixed and winging its way back to me in just one day (how’s that for service???). It should arrive on Friday.

Meanwhile, however, I have four extra modules – on Maryam. It turns out that modules are interchangeable between the two looms, so while Grace’s module #8 was off for repair, I simply swapped in one of Maryam’s modules, and everything is working fine! So I have been spending small snippets of time here and there fixing broken threads, crossed threads, and mis-sleyings. I’m not 100% done, but I’m pretty close.

This is what Grace is weaving now:

This is nothing particularly exciting, but it’s not meant to be. It’s a 2/2 twill, double weave, in 20/2 cotton, black warp, white weft. Its sole purpose is to be so regular and boring that any irregularity, like a missing thread or a thread that isn’t lifting correctly, will be glaringly obvious. I’m doing double weave because the cloth is sett at 90 ends per inch, and if I tried doing a single layer twill the cloth would be too dense to make out individual threads. So I’m weaving and inspecting one layer at 45 ends per inch, and then I’m bringing the bottom layer to the top, and weaving/inspecting it. This allows me to inspect all the threads, just in two batches rather than all at once.

With the exception of about eight threads, this whole debugging process is now complete, so Grace is ready to go. Dave and I are still figuring out velvet equipment, so I’ll probably start with some non-velvet pieces, just so I have something to show at conferences this year. I have some ideas for new work that I will talk about in upcoming blog posts.

And Maryam? We have gotten her talking to the laptop but not to her modules (yet). In anticipation of getting her working, I’ve dyed the first warp for her. I’m putting it on in 10/2 cotton, at 60 ends (threads) per inch. That is double the usual thread density for the fabric I’m planning to weave, but it’s okay – I’m planning to weave two layers of fabric at once, one on top of the other, so it works out perfectly.

Why am I doing that?

Because I’m a masochist, duh. (You didn’t know that yet?)

No, really. It’s because I want to monkey around with things like stripes of color in the warp, and with some structures that require alternating colors in the warp (shadow weave, double weave). If I were weaving with a single layer of warp on a conventional loom, the only way to do that would be to put on a new warp for every sample I wanted to weave, or at least unthread, rethread, and hang off the back of the loom every thread I wanted to change. Pain in the butt.

If, however, I have TWO layers of warp, one in color A and one in Color B, and my mighty loom controls each thread individually, I can just tell the loom, “Okay, put this stripe pattern of Color A in the top layer, and make the rest of the top-layer threads Color B. Put everything else in the bottom layer.” BOOM! Done.

And then, if I want to change to a different stripe pattern, I can just tell the loom what new stripe pattern to use, putting the colors I want on the top layer and dumping all the colors I don’t want into the bottom layer. On the fly. According to my all-powerful whim. Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

(Why yes, I am easily entertained. And no, I don’t get out much. Why do you ask?)

Here’s the warp:

It’s mostly in very boring solid colors, but that’s because I plan to do extensive sampling in different weave structures, stripes, and weft colors. All of which I can do, thanks to Maryam’s incredible powers, more or less instantly. Weavers will understand just how miraculous that is!! She really is a magical loom.

All of this, sadly, is going to have to wait some time. My stepfather, George Birnbaum, has unexpectedly passed away, and I’m flying to the East Coast for his memorial service this weekend. I miss him, and I wish I’d gotten a chance to say goodbye.

We’re still working on getting Maryam talking to my laptop. It turns out she needs the controller card replaced, which means changing out the back beam because the strain gauge built into the back beam, which controls the warp tension, is not compatible with the latest generation of controller cards. (Maryam is one of the early-model TC-2 jacquard looms, and many design changes have taken place since.)

I’ve ordered the parts (Tronrud generously offered a discount on them, which was nice of them!), along with a kit for upgrading the beater and some small replacement parts. Shipping from Norway is so expensive that if a package is to be shipped, I want to pack as much as possible into the package!

Dave (the electromechanical wizard who put together the loom) also came by yesterday to discuss some changes to the vacuum tube pumps and wiring. We want to try wiring up both vacuum pumps to Grace in an effort to give her more thread-lifting oomph. At the moment, she has a tendency to leave some threads down when opening a shed, and we think that’s because she is right up at the maximum number of modules they recommend for a single pump – 12 modules. So she may not be outputting enough vacuum to pull up threads that have more friction. Attaching a second vacuum pump might help with that.

Of course, attaching a second vacuum pump creates some logistical problems. For example, now we need to run two vacuum pumps at once, which means putting in a second 220-volt electrical circuit to the garage. It also means wiring both pumps up to Grace AND one pump up to Maryam, and figuring out how to flip switches appropriately. And it means figuring out a system of hoses and valves such that two pumps’ worth of vacuum attach to Grace and one pump’s worth attach to Maryam, but not at the same time.

None of which are impossible, but which I’d have to do a LOT of digging to figure out, as I am not electromechanically inclined. So I am grateful for having both a spouse and a friend who understands these things.

Dave came over yesterday to discuss all this and to sketch out the design for the hoses, valves, and wiring, so I grabbed the opportunity to take a proper photo of the two of us with Grace and Maryam:

The delay in starting up Maryam isn’t really going to delay my weaving on her, though. It will take about a week to get parts from Tronrud and get them installed, but that’s fine – it will take me that long to prepare the warp to go onto her, anyway. I’m going to do a pretty complicated pair of warps to go onto her, which I will talk about in my next blog post.

The warps are for the painted warp class I’m developing for 2020. I bought Maryam because I can develop my color samples infinitely more efficiently on her – I can change weave structures and color striping very quickly using her ability to control each thread individually – and I’m very excited to see what our future will bring.

Saturday was the loom assembly party! My friends Brian, Chris, and Dave came over to help me put Maryam together.

(Maryam, if you missed my previous posts, is my new-to-me TC-2 jacquard loom, named after Maryam Mirzakhani, the brilliant mathematician and first female Fields Medalist. All my looms are named after female mathematicians, except for Grace, who is named after renowned software titan Grace Hopper.)

Here’s what Maryam looked like shortly before 11am, when Dave (the brains behind the operation) arrived:

I had spent about two hours carefully unpacking and unwrapping all the loom bits and laying them out on clean cardboard in the driveway for easy access. This cleared enough room to work in the garage. The sides and the other heavy pieces I left propped up against the garage walls.

Once Dave and Chris arrived, we started assembling the frame. Dave, who is the electromechanical genius who led the assembly of Grace, was gracious and generous enough to agree to put Maryam together as well. (Thank goodness; it would have taken us at least three times as long to figure everything out without him!)

Here’s Dave on the left, getting ready to replace Grace’s feet with ratcheting leveling casters. The leveling casters convert from feet to wheels and back to feet again, making it easy to roll Maryam around when she needs to be moved – no small matter since she weighs about 750 lbs!

After putting on the new feet, the first assembly step was to connect the two side pieces. This is an important and tricky step; each side piece weighs about 200 pounds, and the bottom weighs about 50-60 pounds, so many hands were needed to keep things stable and lined up properly. Brian, Chris, Dave, my esteemed spouse, and I all held and shifted parts about while Dave crawled about the bottom, installing the twenty-two (!) bolts that secured the frame together. (Yes, twenty-two. When those Norwegian engineers put something together, it STAYS together!!)

Now the frame was stable enough to stand on its own:

At this point, we no longer needed everyone, so Brian went home, and Chris, Dave, and I continued on with assembly.

Next step was putting on the front and back top assemblies. Also well-supplied with bolts, and built from nice, thick plates of solid steel. If you want something built right, order it from Tronrud Engineering. They do not mess around!

Then we installed the back beam, which was a little tricky since we had to thread the sensor cables through the right side of the loom and hook up the wiring to the loom controller card in the right side. The TC-2 is really cool in that it controls warp tension automatically via a sensor (strain gauge) on the back beam. You can set the tension to a particular level on the computer, and the loom automatically rolls the warp beam forward or back to achieve that level of tension. Nifty, eh?

Here we are after installing the back beam:

The next step (after installing the beater and the front beam) was to install the heddle kits and controller modules. Chris and Dave did that:

For those not familiar with loom guts, the heddles (the long springy things that Chris is putting into the loom) are what lift the threads up and down when the loom is working.

TC-2s work very differently from a standard loom in that the threads are controlled individually, and are lifted via a vacuum pump. Each heddle has a little piston on top, which goes into a shaft in the controller module above it. At the top of the shaft is a baby valve, connected to a kid-sized hose at the top of the module, which connects to a big-momma hose at the top of the loom, connected to a giant-momma vacuum pump located in a corner of the garage. When the loom is running, if a thread is supposed to go up, the computer directs the controller module to open the valve at the top of the shaft, the piston gets sucked up the shaft by the vacuum from the pump, and – TA-DAA!! – the thread rises.

Clever, these monkeys.

Anyway – heddles installed, front, back, side covers put on, warp and cloth beams added, and – drum roll please!! –

SAY HELLO TO MARYAM!!!

It took us a total of six hours to get Maryam together. I can’t thank everyone enough, especially Dave, without whom it would have taken three times as long, if we could have figured it out at all.

And here, after another couple hours of cleaning out the garage, is the family photo – Grace and Maryam, snuggled up together in their new home.

Maryam is a bit shy, and we haven’t gotten her to talk to my laptop yet, but the wonderful folks at Digital Weaving Norway/Tronrud Engineering are helping me troubleshoot things, and I’m confident that we’ll have her saying “Hello World!” sometime soon. I’m already planning my first warp on her, which will be a set of painted-warp samples for the course I plan to release next year.

Please welcome Maryam!!