Sunrise on a new loom

A sunrise is a beautiful thing, and recently they have been on my mind a lot. While at camp I easily see the sunrise each day. As the time to head back home approaches, I really miss my sunrise time. The above image is from the Arizona desert, but the colours really impressed me.

 An early season sunrise is portrayed in this photo taken at camp. You can see snow on the ground. And there is always a difficulty in taking good sunrise photos there, because the forest is still dark and the pictures generally come out underexposed. But you will find some nicer sunrise pictures on this blog if you search for them.

When it came time to think about what to do with the very plain wood of this new-to-me loom, I still had sunrise on the brain. This is the Rio Grande Kit Loom, or Rio Grande Walking Loom.

Since I bought it I have sanded it twice and stained it twice with the two shades of aniline dyes. There is one coat of a clear polyurethane on top.

I used a shade called yellow-gold-orange and another called magenta. I wanted the effect of a gradual transition of colour, as in a sunrise, and so some pieces of wood will display both colours. The wood is pine, and not particularly nice pine at that.

I want to have the portions closest to the weaver in the orangey tone and the lower and further away parts in the magenta. I hope I have analysed each board correctly and all will go as desired once the loom is assembled. Both the breast beam and the back beam will be wrapped in copper to add to durability when using linen rug warp. I think it will look really pretty as well.

In this final image you see the entire loom. Pretty soon I will be wrapping and packing this up for transport to Canada. I already have a rug loom here (the Harrisville Rug Loom) and would like to have one dedicated to rugs up there. 

And so the next time I blog about this loom I hope to be showing off the assembled loom, and ideally it will have a warp on it!