Tien Chiu

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December 9, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Look at the pretty birdie

Five hours of unremitting labor today produced this:

phoenix samples
phoenix samples

That’s the fine-tuned sample. The first few hours of work looked quite different:

debugging the warp
debugging the warp

Even with all the care I took in threading and sleying, a lot of debugging was needed. (Count the pins in the photo if you don’t believe me.) Then I had to fix the aspect ratio – I was using a superfine reeled silk thread, which collapsed the phoenixes into squat little blobs. I doubled the length of the image, and got the lovely phoenixes in the final sample.

I’m still troubleshooting a number of things – for one thing, I’m getting unsightly loops in the tabby warps. I’m guessing this is because the tabby warp is too loose compared to the pattern warp, so I need to adjust the tension further. But I’ve made tremendous progress, and things are actually working quite well. Aside from setting up and debugging, I’ve woven over a thousand picks today. Believe it or not, each of the longer phoenixes is about 280 picks! That’s what happens when you weave with such fine yarns.

OK. Now off to do all the things that I should have been doing!

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: phoenix rising

Previous post: Oh what fun, to laugh and sing…
Next post: More pretty birdies

Comments

  1. Feraljoy says

    December 9, 2012 at 10:56 pm

    Oh. Wow!!! That is gorgeous and amazing beyond all words. I’m sitting here with my mouth hanging open. I may have to eat one of your chocolates to stop the drooling.  Seriously, that may be the most amazing bit of weaving I’ve ever seen!

  2. Shelley says

    December 10, 2012 at 1:18 am

    How beautiful.  My daughter (16) is adopted from China.  The firt part of her name, Feng, means phoenix.  If I ever get an AVL, I’m going to bug you for the set up for this.

  3. ann says

    December 10, 2012 at 6:08 am

    Oh, so worth all of the work.  It is unbelievably beautiful!

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