Armadillo Armor: the Spotty sections

First, many thanks for all the help on yesterday's draft!  I have a scarf to weave for someone out of red and yellow and now I can warp my 4-shaft loom with that project.  But for now, I finally found a chance to start my armadillo!!!  Things get pretty busy here in the spring, and even though I only work 4-days a week, it seems like there's a lot to do on those 3 days off!  And I have had quite a few special orders to fill lately.  Honestly, I didn't expect all this business after Christmas!

So, this is the start of the armadillos from Amy Preckshot's book Weaving a Zoo.  I did some thinking and planning for them first.  Amy has you weave 2 different kinds of fabric for the armadillo, so I am starting with the armor part.  I kind of had to guess about how much fabric to weave, so hopefully things will all work out ok in the end and I will have enough of each kind, but not too much!



 I chose to stick to browns because I lack gray tones.  Hopefully my armadillos won't mind being brown!  I am using my typical 12/2 cotton yarn for these.

I am weaving about 14" width for the armor fabric. I have it set at a tabby set of 20 epi.  It looks like an overshot-like fabric with floats going on (but no half-tones), so it shouldn't be too hard to weave.  It will be tabby weave in-between each shot of float yarn.

I will need to weave lots of spots and a few pyramids, like 21 rows of spots and 8 rows of pyramids.  But with the spots for the tail, I don't really need to include that in the whole scheme of things, maybe only once at the beginning or end of the piece. 



One of the 3 colors I chose is very golden-y.  It reminds me of homemade gingerbread cookies!  I warped 4 yards for the armor fabric, but the body will have about 6-8 yards.  I'm predicting 4 animals again this time around, but it's hard to say.

 I have changed Amy's pattern just a little bit.  My circles were so squatty because I am using the same size of yarn for both the floats and the tabby weave.  To correct this, I decided to stick an extra center piece in each circle, and I like it a lot!  Perhaps she didn't want them to be complete circles, but it conflicts with my inner perfectionist that wants things to look more even.... plus, once it comes off the loom it will only be more squatty!  So here is what I am doing:

  Here is a picture of what I have so far:

 The one row of circles at the bottom are the squatty circles, but the rest are the more even circles.  I think this would look really cool in red and black for a lady bug!  I'll put that on my ever growing "to-do" list.

But I'm in it for good now!  There's no turning back...









I've never actually seen a real armadillo, so I searched for a video on youtube.com and found this cute video! 

Enjoy!