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Technical Information |
 My loom is an AVL/TIS jacquard handloom. The three electronic jacquard heads were manufactured by TIS in France. Each head contains 576 jacquard hooks for a total of 1728 hooks. These heads are mounted on a specially designed 72 inch weaving width AVL loom frame and are operated by a computer, an electronic control box and a stepping motor. In a feature that is unusual for jacquard looms, the sett (warp ends per inch) is easily adjustable from a minimum of 24 epi (ends per inch) to a maximum of 96 epi. The AVL loom frame has many of the features of other AVL looms: sectional beams, automatic warp tensioning, automatic cloth advance and a single-box fly shuttle.The design process begins with my own digital photographs. My camera is a FUJI Finepix 4900. The maximum image resolution of this camera is 1800 x 2400 pixels. Because 1800 pixels closely corresponds to the number of hooks in the jacquard loom, there is minimal loss of visual information when the photograph is translated into a weaving. After manipulating the digital image in Photoshop, I use the ArahWeave CAD (Computer Aided Design) program for jacquard to convert the image into a digital weave file using weave structures that I have designed. This weave file is then used by the loom computer to control the raising and lowering of the individual warp ends as the piece is woven. For more information about AVL looms, about ArahWeave software and about other artists working with jacquard looms, check out the Links page. |