Tien Chiu | Tien Chiu

September 10, 2019 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Inching towards velvet

Again the silence! Color & Design, my new course, launched last Tuesday. (Find out more about it here.) It’s been an exhausting launch for a variety of reasons – chief among them is that, despite appearances, I’m a serious introvert, so making an extended sales pitch to thousands of people leaves me emotionally exhausted. Not to mention physically and mentally exhausted from all the work involved!

So in my limited free time, I have been escaping into mindless loom labor. You may remember that, about a thousand years ago, I mentioned that after Amazing Grace, my TC-2 jacquard loom, was threaded, we discovered a half-twist in the warp behind the heddles. Which, in turn, required cutting the warp, untwisting it, and tying it back on, thread by thread. For about 1,000 threads.

Ricki, bless their soul, did the bulk of that work. I did the last few threads two days ago, and pulled the knots through the reed yesterday!! Then – individual thread by individual thread – I drew each of the 2,640 threads tight to make sure that there were no loose threads caught behind the heddles, and tied on. Here we are now, every thread nice, tight, and even:

So now Grace is threaded, sleyed, and ready to weave. Right?

Well, not quite.

Every time you thread a loom, there’s the possibility of threading errors. Actually, check that: Unless you are a miracle worker, there are threading errors. Also sleying errors (mistakes pulling the threads through the reed). On a jacquard loom, you can add stuck heddles to that – Grace has been sitting around for two years, which jacquard looms don’t like, and we also rearranged her configuration, which can introduce dust into the pistons and bores. All of which need to be caught and debugged.

So that’s what I’ll be doing for the next while.

But that’s okay, because I need to set up the rest of the velvet equipment. In particular, I need the velvet rods, the velvet spools, and the velvet rack to hold the spools. Each velvet warp thread needs to be individually tensioned on its own separate spool (oy vey!), and there will be 880 of them, so that is a LOT of spools!

Fortunately, I have a genius software engineer for a partner, armed with a 3-D printer, so once we decide the dimensions of the velvet rack, designing and printing 880 spools should be more tedious than difficult. (Winding them will be equally tedious, but at least I will have pretty colors to console me!) Building the velvet rack should be equally simple.

No, the kicker will be the velvet rods. I had planned to use nylon monofilament, with a curved velvet knife to keep the blade roughly centered on the pile, and may still do so. But I’ve been advised (indirectly) by the velvet experts at the Lisio Foundation that this may make it difficult to get a nice even cut pile. They suggested finding an old jacquard mill and asking to use their old rods, but I have no idea where to start finding one. I tried talking to a place with a CNC milling machine, but it turns out they would be very difficult to mill on a CNC machine because of the tiny dimensions.

So a friend suggested another possibility: Have them 3-D printed in metal! She thinks it would be quite possible if we can produce the right CAD files. So I’ve written off to the Lisio Foundation to see if they’d be willing to provide measurements for their velvet rods. If that doesn’t pan out, then I’ll take a stab at designing my own, and just adjust as needed. (It might actually be more fun to design my own!)

Meanwhile, off to debug the warp!

August 24, 2019 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

One launch down, and lookee what I found!!

I launched my free mini-course on color in weaving yesterday! It’s about designing handwoven cloth with bold or subtle patterns, and is designed to solve the age-old problem of your beautiful, bright colors weaving into dull, boring mud. If you’re interested in it, go check it out! It’s free, so you’ve got nothing to lose except your fear of another color disaster.

This free mini-course, and the bigger paid course launch that’s coming up right behind it, are the reason you haven’t heard much from me recently. Getting the courses and the marketing campaign behind the launch ready to go has been an insane amount of work – the last three weeks I’ve been working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, getting everything ready and putting on the final coat of polish. Yesterday I announced the course to my mailing list, and promptly fell over exhausted. I am taking today OFF.

And what am I doing with my day off? Why, preparing for the arrival of the lovely Maryam! The garage is PACKED with stuff, and since she arrives in 3.5 weeks, I’ll need to do some decluttering to make space.

Um, just a little bit of decluttering. Here’s where she’s going to live:

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me.

Fortunately, a lot of the work isn’t too hard. Much of the stuff I’ve accumulated is craft stuff where I’ve clearly headed in other directions, so selling or donating it to others who will make better use of it is a fine idea. The table will replace the rickety table in the back yard. The chairs? Haven’t figured that out yet, but I think they can fit next to Maryam on the sides. The elliptical trainer will be replaced by a rowing machine that can be moved around when I need to warp Maryam. So life moves on, and it’s all a matter of logistics and cleaning things up.

Of course, when you clear out the old to make room for the new, interesting finds crop up. I was sorting through a box of ancient memorabilia yesterday and found this!

That’s me on the cover of Farang Magazine, back in 2003 when I was backpacking through Southeast Asia. Yep, wearing only body paint. 🙂 Through a series of fabulous adventures, I had convinced the best body painter in Bangkok to paint me – just for the fun of it (and he normally charges $5,000/day!) – and he had arranged a photo shoot with a photographer friend. Then his buddy at Farang Magazine called him up, he was stumped for a cover for the latest issue, did Richard have any suggestions? And next thing I knew, I was gracing the cover of a Thai travel magazine, clad only in body paint. (Well, and a shell necklace, if you want to be technical.)

Ah, those were the days.

But those carefree days of lost youth are behind me now. I’m now beyond such frivolity, bent on more serious things. Like total world domination. It’s seed-saving time!

Here are a few of the steps in my seed-saving process.

First, I gather tomatoes from my adorable killer mutant ninja tomatoes. I taste-test them, write my (terse) notes on a slip of paper, and photograph the fruits next to a quarter (for scale) along with the plant number. That will all go into my tomato database.

As you can see, I’m getting yellow Fruity Mix tomatoes this year. This is an excellent thing – last year’s were all red, and I was worried that the yellow genes had all gotten lost. But this year I got orange and yellow as well as red – so am selecting all of the above!

Next step is to squeeze out the fruit gel into labeled cups, and let the gel ferment for a couple days so the gel around the seeds rots away. (The gel contains a germination inhibitor, and also can carry diseases.) After a few days, this cup looks delightfully ripe and rotted:

Next you rinse out the seeds (they sink to the bottom, the gunky stuff pours off the top), dry them on an uncoated paper plate, and put them in a neatly labeled paper envelope. Voila! Freshly saved killer mutant ninja tomato seeds, ready to wreak havoc on another unsuspecting generation.

Of course, the next task is to enter all the information into the database. That’s what I’m not looking forward to. Perhaps later today….

Anyway, I have not been silent because life has been slow. Quite the reverse: it has been PACKED!! Hopefully things should slow down a bit soon, so I won’t be quite so exhausted all the time, and will have other things to show you.

August 15, 2019 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Glitter girl

There are people who are perfectly mature, and capable of acting their age.

And then, of course, there’s me.

I went to a hairstylist last weekend. That’s not entirely unprecedented – it’s happened twice before – but unlike both previous times, I wasn’t getting married later that day. (At least, not that I knew about.)

No, I was getting rainbow glitter hair extensions tied into my hair. Not for any reason, other than delighting my inner six-year-old.

(By a curious coincidence, my shoe size actually is 6.5. Fortunately, I live in the U.S., because my European shoe size is 38, so the old admonition “Act your age, not your shoe size” would be much less funny if I lived there!)

Anyway, a hat tip to Syne Mitchell, who gave me the idea at ANWG (see what you learn at weaving conferences?). Syne had subtle strands of holographic glitter woven into her (much shorter) hair. I abandoned subtlety and went for the whole rainbow.

Here’s a shot halfway through the process: rainbow sprinkles on one side, plain ebony on the other.

And here’s a closer look at the rainbow side (the photo really doesn’t do the holographic glitter justice):

The rainbow strands, alas, have been sliding out of my hair at a remarkable clip – about half of them have departed after only three days. But I’ve been really enjoying it, and what’s left is truly wonderful. It’s now subtle enough to vanish at a distance, but glittery enough to provoke a delighted grin once I get closer, and the rainbow flashes out from under the sober black.

Just the way I like it. 🙂

July 30, 2019 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

…but you can’t take the chocolatier out of the girl!

You may recall that I retired last year as a semi-pro chocolatier, after 30 years in the biz, on the grounds that things had gotten a wee bit excessive and a woman with Type 2 diabetes really shouldn’t be making chocolates anyway.

Apparently I forgot who I was dealing with.

(You’d think that, after 49 years of living with myself, I’d have learned, but apparently not. Sheesh.)

It all started so innocently. I was trying to find a low-sugar chocolate that I actually liked, using the obvious method of ordering one of every possible type of 80+% cacao-solids chocolate from Chocosphere and then sampling little bits of each bar. (Fortunately, my esteemed spouse, while significantly fussier than before meeting me, is still willing to eat most of my rejects.) I found one I liked – which promptly went out of stock, with no projected resupply date. It was also annoyingly expensive.

(A momentary rant: People who brag at you about the cacao-solids percentage of their preferred chocolate bar generally haven’t the slightest clue what that means. In a dark chocolate, the cacao-solids percentage tells you how much sugar is in the bar. That is ALL it tells you. Dark chocolate is made of cocoa butter, cocoa powder, sugar, and a tiny bit of lecithin, usually soy lecithin, that helps the emulsion stay together. Cocoa butter and cocoa powder are both considered cocoa solids. Lecithin is typically well under 1% of the bar. Therefore, bragging “My favorite chocolate is 66% cocoa solids” is exactly the same as bragging “My favorite chocolate is 34% sugar.” Exactly.

Percentage of cocoa solids tells you nothing about the actual measures of quality – the flavor of the chocolate, the amount of cocoa butter relative to cocoa powder, the intensity of flavor of the cocoa powder, the variety of cacao tree and the region in which it was grown, the darkness to which the cacao beans are roasted, or any of a slew of things that are way more important than the amount of sugar in the bar. So please. Stop it with the cacao percentages. Talk about something that matters.)

My favorite brand, Valrhona, did sell a low-sugar (85%) chocolate bar, but it was their Abinao flavor, which I find unpleasantly astringent and overly tart. Annoyingly, they had my favorite flavor, Alpaco, in a 66% cacao solids and an unsweetened chocolate form, but did they have it in 83%?? Noooo….if I wanted something like that, I was just going to have to make my own.

Well, okay. If that’s how you want to be about it…I can recognize a gauntlet when it’s tossed in my face. I had given away all my chocolatiering equipment when I “retired,” but fortunately, I still had a few tricks up my chocolatier sleeve, and one of them is a Cacao Barry product called Mycryo. Mycryo is a powdered, highly-crystallized cocoa butter that is designed to seed melted chocolate with the stable beta crystals that result in beautiful, glossy tempered chocolate. Without a tempering machine. (That’s how we semi-pros do it: We know how to cheat!)

So I ordered 1 kilo of unsweetened and 1 kilo of 66% Alpaco from Chocosphere. Ah, who am I kidding? I ordered three kilos of each. What on earth can you do with only two kilos of chocolate?? That’s less than five pounds! Ridiculously small quantities. Sheesh.

Then I ran a small test batch, sort of a proof of concept, to see if my idea would work. I melted one kilo of unsweetened, and about a quarter-kilo of 66%, to 110 F or so, then dumped in 500g of the (unmelted, still-tempered) 66%, stirred around until it reached 94F, then dumped in 20g of the Mycro as in the directions, added a trifle more of the 66%, and waited until it reached working temperature, about 91F. Now I had this lovely bowl:

bowl of tempered chocolate — 4.5 pounds of tempered chocolate

I had bought a few polycarbonate chocolate bar molds, but they were patently not up to handling 2 kg worth of chocolate. After filling all four of these, I still had about 3/4 of the chocolate left:

chocolate poured into bar molds — Chocolate in bar molds
(lower left: dried sour cherries and hazelnuts added after filling the mold)

So I started pouring pools of melted chocolate into a sheet pan and mixing in chopped-up tasty bits: dried figs, dried sour cherries, peanuts, hazelnuts, and macadamia nuts. I even added some peanut butter to a batch to make peanut gianduja. (Like Reese’s peanut butter cups, only much, much better!)

Here’s one of the puddles of chocolate (cherry-hazelnut, I think):

Now I have about 6 pounds of fairly low-sugar (85% cocoa-solids) chocolate in eight or nine different mixes with macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, peanut butter, figs, and dried sour cherries. It’s a good thing I’m not a chocolate junkie – I’m perfectly capable of eating just 2-3 pieces a day, which is well within the bounds of a reasonable diet, even for someone with Type 2 diabetes. So I’ve got plenty of variety to nibble on, and fortunately, I also have a spouse who does not have Type 2 diabetes and will happily vacuum up the rest long before it goes stale, giving me an excellent excuse for making more.

…and they (and their cats) lived happily ever after. 🙂

July 26, 2019 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Only two things that money can’t buy…

…and let’s face it, true love is overrated. (Sorry, sweetie!)

These are coming out of the garden right now:

plate full of ten or fifteen varieties of tomatoes — bountiful tomatoes!

These are the eating tomatoes, the ones I’m not trying to breed. They’re mostly newer varieties, mostly from Wild Boar Farms. I’m very fond of Brad Gates’ work. In addition to breeding beautiful tomatoes, and tasty tomatoes, he’s also breeding tomatoes for extreme conditions – hot, cold, drought, etc. – in anticipation of climate change. I’m all for anything that will result in continued tomato production in a time of turmoil. Particularly such delicious tomatoes!

Varieties include Sweet Cream, Berkeley Tie-Dye, Sungold, Kaleidescope Jewel, Sunrise Bumblebee, Pink Bumblebee, the tried-and-true Brandywine, Purple Calabash, Cascade Lava, and Brad’s Atomic Grape. Those are just the ones I recognize off the top of my head – there are undoubtedly others. A woman with forty or fifty kids can’t be expected to recognize all of them at first blush! At least, not if you’re me. I’ve never been great with names.

But of course these aren’t the real prizes. The real prizes (sorry, kids!) are the ones that don’t have names, only numbers – the ones that are part of my Fruity Mix breeding project. I grew out thirty-two plants from the three plants that bred true from the last year. Only five of the thirty-two produced tomatoes with the intense, wonderful flavor I was after, and here are an assortment of fruits from those:

I forgot to put in a dime for scale, but the image on my monitor as I type this is about real life scale. The smallest one is just under the size of a dime, and the biggest one is bigger than a nickel but well under the size of a quarter. They are (as originally described) a small cherry tomato, so this is getting back to the original variety. I’m not overly concerned about conservation (it’s flavor I’m after, not returning the variety to its roots), but it’s a sign that I’m on the right track.

I’m delighted to see that the yellow and orange colors have surfaced in this generation. Last generation all the tomatoes were red, and I was worried that the other colors were lost to posterity. However, pink flesh and yellow skin (which produces a red tomato) are both dominant genes, so if the Fruity Mix had gotten crossed to a homozygous-for-red tomato, all the offspring would necessarily have been red in the first generation. In the second generation, the other colors would start coming out as the recessive genes paired up, and I’m pleased to see that there were other colors lurking under the red. I got plenty of red tomatoes, but quite a few yellow and orange and even a red-and-yellow striped tomato! I have no idea where that one came from, but unfortunately the flavor wasn’t great, so I’m not going to grow out its offspring.

There are lots of tasty tomatoes among the 32 plants I grew, but only 5 or 6 have the intensely fruity flavor I’m breeding for. So I am saving seed from the tasty-but-not-Fruity ones (not sure why, maybe just because I’m a pack rat?), but next year I will only grow out seeds from the best Fruity lines. I don’t have time to pursue more than that.

The good news is that only a few fruits are enough to carry on the next generation of breeding, which means lots of tasty tomatoes to eat this year! I’m carrying a small container of them with me to Maryland – I’m flying out there today for a short visit (my esteemed spouse is holding down the fort at home), tomatoes and garlic in hand.