Swans Island: Feature & Yarn Sale

AVL Looms are used around the world by many skilled artisans. Today we're highlighting one of the many companies that use our looms to create beautiful products. Swans Island is a blanket company in Maine. They source high quality materials to make hand dyed yarn, and then weave that yarn into blankets, scarves, and shawls. 

 Swans Island has 4 AVL looms: two 8' rug looms, a 6' rug loom, and a 60" PDL.

A rainbow of hand painted yarn. 

A wall of hand woven blankets in the Swans Island showroom. 

Swans Island Yarn Sale

And now we're making it easy for you to create your own beautiful hand woven items with your AVL Loom and Swans Island yarn! Get 35% off retail with the coupon code AVLYARN!

Reducing Our Eco-Footprint

Here at AVL we're doing our best to decrease our eco-footprint. Today we're sharing some of the measures we've taken to reduce our waste.

1. We've replaced all our non fluorescent lighting--it's already saved about 50% off our electricity bill!
2. We've installed a cardboard shredder--this allows us to reuse boxes and scraps of cardboard into packing materials. This eliminates hundreds of pounds of cardboard from landfills each year. 
3. We've installed 30kw of solar panels that will eliminate our need for carbon-based electricity. To date we've saved over 2,700 lbs of CO2!

Solar panels on the roof at AVL Looms

AVL at Fiber Fusion

Last weekend we sent Ryan to man a booth at Fiber Fusion. It's a great local event full of fiber fun and education here in Chico. Today we're sharing some photos from the weekend!

Converting the next generation of weavers!

New Program: ArahPaint (free)

ArahPaint5 out of beta, now for Linux, Mac and Windows!

ArahPaint is a program for drawing textile images with reduced number of colors, in repeat. It was only available for Linux, but it is available also for Mac OS X and Windows. We have finished the long beta testing and now it is ready for our demanding users. 

ArahPaint is FREE, please download it, and if you like it, recommend it to friends!

Download:

Windows
Mac 

Additional Links:
Updated user's manual

Keyboard short-cuts

Pictorial explanation of filters in ArahPaint

Some new features with respect to the previous versions:

• much faster drawing for large images
• better visibility of guides (double click on ruler to create a guide)
• "Tools>find repeat" now works on larger images
• in image browser, filter image by image type or format
• always display RGB values of the pixel pointed to by the mouse
• autoscroll is now progressive (the more out of window the mouse, the faster the scroll)
• ability to change default image format from PNG to TIFF or BMP
• fit to window view
• keyboard shortcut "1" now toggles between 100% view and previous zoom and position

Weaving in Thailand

Weaving is an old tradition that's practiced throughout the world. Here at AVL Looms we're glad to help carry on this tradition, and find joy in celebrating the many forms of weaving. Today we're excited to share some photos of weaving from the Thai Silk Museum, sent to us by a longtime customer and friend Jim Thompson from the Thai Silk Company.