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April 13, 2021 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Slow growth, exciting seeds

After a week of slow and steady work, probably another 6-8 hours of threading, I have made significant progress. I have gone from 10% done to 29.3% done, according to my calculations! (Hey, that .3% is important! Every bit counts.)

"Fire" warp progress, 8.5 of 29" threaded — Fire warp progress

I have now tied on 8.5 of 29″ worth of threads. At the current rate, it will take 2-3 weeks to finish tying on, at which point I can sley and then pull through the threads. So it will be a month at least before I can start weaving.

Actually it will be more than a month. Lurking in the background, after all, is Grace and the Gradients warp that will go onto her. I haven’t done anything with it because Grace needs some major parts upgrades (four new heddle kits) and I’ve been waiting for those to arrive. DHL says they’ll arrive on Wednesday, at which point I’ll have 13.5 yards of warp to beam and 1,760 heddles to thread before I can start weaving THAT warp. Which, unlike the Fire warp, actually has a deadline – I’m teaching a class on gradients starting at the beginning of August, so there is very clearly no time to lose. So as soon as Grace’s parts arrive, I’m going to start working on the Gradients warp as well as the Fire warp. Time to find more verses to those threading songs!

Excitingly, however, I think I have found some fabulous things to create with Maryam and the Fire warp. A new format to explore. To explain, waaaaaaay back when, in 2010, I took a class in two-dimensional design, and as part of that class, I created a book out of fabric, telling the story of my transformation from a mathematician to an artist. It was an accordion book, and here are the panels of the book:

Front cover of book (handwoven fabric in background)

Here’s the full book, opened up completely, minus the last two pages with the pop-up girl:

Obviously, it’s not a technical masterpiece (I had only a few days to make it), but I was intrigued both by the accordion-folded format and by the idea of telling a story with fabric. Collage wasn’t a medium I could take to weaving shows, though, and I didn’t really have a loom that could weave a story back then, so I let the idea drop.

Of course, now I DO have a loom that can weave a story. And I’m still intrigued by the book format. Accordion books are intriguingly three dimensional, and I have a long standing interest in origami that dates aaaaalllll the way back to my college days. Back when I was in the mental hospital at the end of my year of graduate school (being blunt, I was about to kill myself in a bout of bipolar depression; I’m glad I didn’t, but it was touch and go for awhile), there wasn’t much you could do in the acute care unit, aka the locked ward – for obvious reasons they wouldn’t let you have yarn, knitting needles or crochet hooks, but paper was perfectly fine, so I spent a week diving into my other interest, origami. So sculptural paper intrigues me, and always has. It is one VERY small step from paper to cloth…

Of course, accordion books are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to books. I was intrigued by Alice Schlein’s jacquard-woven cloth-bound books, but bound books weren’t what I wanted to do. Accordion books were interesting, but didn’t seem sculpturally interesting enough to bring to a show.

And then I stumbled on Charlotte Rivers’ Little Book of Book Making. It’s an amazing book, about 65% inspiration and 35% tutorials. The tutorials aren’t terribly in-depth, but that’s okay: it was inspiration I was after, and I found tons of insipration in this book! It turns out that there are a TON of creatively folded sculptural formats for books: dragon books, accordion books, flag-fold books – all of which have wonderful possibilities for working with cloth. The advantage of all these formats is that they (a) open up to three dimensions and (b) fold flat, which is important for storage. I don’t have the space for a lot of big three-dimensional pieces!

So I am HUGELY excited now about weaving cloth books. I already have an idea for a cloth book titled Genesis, with a design that evolves from very simple, black and white, to a much more complex and rich design over the space of seven panels. Of course that is just a starting-point for an idea; the actual finished piece will likely be very different.

I’ve ordered a couple more books on bookmaking, and will order some bookmaking materials for building design prototypes as soon as the books arrive and I know what I need to order.

Meanwhile, of course, there is the endless tying-on of threads to occupy me…

April 6, 2021 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Philosophical musings

Two or three more hours of threading have moved me along to here in the tying-on:

warp with about three inches of yarns tied on — Progress on “Fire” warp

I’ve finished tying on about three inches of the 29″ wide warp, so I’m about 10% done. At 2,640 threads, that means I’ve got 264 threads tied on, or about 45 seconds per thread. That’s awfully slow, but I’m taking my time, pulling each thread through the original cross to make sure I’ve got the right thread before taking another thread. I’m alternating between orange threads and black threads, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve mistakenly grabbed an orange thread when I should have grabbed a black one! I guess I naturally gravitate towards orange. 🙂

Also, I’m in a wrist brace, battling tendinitis in my right arm. It’s getting better since I switched to a left-handed trackball, but it does make tying knots more awkward. So it will likely take me 30+ hours to tie on this warp, and another 5 hours or so to pull through and sley the reed. (I had to take the warp out of the reed while swapping out loom guts.) And then, of course, I’ll have to weave several inches and spend a few hours debugging everything before I can weave anything. Patience, grasshopper!

Then, of course, there is the question of WHAT to weave. And that gets me to the philosophical question.

One of the things I want to do in my work is explore the limits of jacquard weaving. When I see jacquard weaving in exhibits, I see a lot of work that is basically using the loom as a low-resolution printer: creating imagery in cloth, using fairly simple structures. While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with doing that, it barely scratches the surface of what is possible with such a powerful tool. I feel that if I’m going to own a loom that can do virtually anything, I should explore all the “anything” that it can do. (Kind of like owning a Ferrari – if all you’re going to do is commute to work on surface streets, why did you spend all that money on a car that can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds flat?)

Of course this is a logical fallacy. Just because you own a tool doesn’t mean you have to be “owned” by the tool, creatively speaking – even if you have a fancy hammer, everything doesn’t have to be a nail. But beyond the guilt engendered by having an expensive tool that you aren’t using to its full potential, I also feel drawn to explore the intriguing and complex technical spaces opened up by having a jacquard loom.

For example: most woven shibori is done with relatively simple, repeating patterning because of the limitations of shaft looms. What happens when you do more complex patterning? Imagery? Double weave with one layer drawn up and the other left loose? Combine that with imagery in the drawn-up layer? Double weave with different drawn-up patterns in each layer?

Any of these would be difficult to do with a shaft loom, but can be woven with a jacquard loom. (Admittedly, it may involve significant contortions in setting up the design.)

From an artistic standpoint, the question is whether all that technical exploration is really necessary to art. And, of course, it isn’t. Art is about what you are saying, not how you got there. Which is probably why most art exhibits feature the low-resolution printer type of jacquard weaving. The artist was focusing on message, not exploring technique. Which is fine, if your purpose is art.

I’m not so convinced that my purpose is art. As I said on my recent Textiles and Tea interview with the Handweavers Guild of America, I think of myself as a researcher. I seek to explore, to learn things, then I publish and teach what I’ve learned. The art is important to me, but it’s more a part of the exploration and research than an end in itself. And that’s just fine.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this realization, but I’m good with it.

I’m still deciding what to explore with the Fire warp. Fortunately, with 35 hours of physical work to go before I can weave anything, I’ve got plenty of time to think about it. I’ve also got parts arriving late this week for Grace, which will enable me to put on the Color Gradients sample warp. So I’ve got plenty of time to decide what I want to explore.

April 3, 2021 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Tiger warp?

It took some doing, but I beamed on the Fire warp a few days ago. I’m starting to think I should have named it the Tiger warp. I bet you can guess why!

Black and orange warp, beamed on in stripes

Of course those rich orange and black stripes are making me think of fabulous tigers. I recently cleaned my office (which was literally buried two feet deep in Stuff!) and found a copy of Sally Eyring’s 3-D Handloom Weaving: Sculptural Tools and Techniques, which I had been meaning to read for quite some time now. I was thinking that something three-dimensional would be fun to do with that gorgeous orange and black (I was thinking phoenix wings at the time), so I picked up the book and started paging through it. Alas, most of the techniques that Sally outlines use warps that are used up at vastly different rates and are thus not beamed together, so I set the book aside after a brief glance.

But the idea of three dimensions has captured my attention. So far I’ve paged through the origami-with-fabric book Shadowfolds, and am about to dive into Lotte Dalgaard’s Magical Materials to Weave and Ann Richards’ Weaving Textiles that Shape Themselves. I have visions of a wild tiger mask, woven with silk-wrapped copper or brass wire as weft (I have a bunch of it that I bought at Habu Textiles many years ago), which would allow me to shape it into a face. It could be embellished, or not. I fancy the idea of raw, frayed edges around the outside, perhaps with extra shaggy threads attached, even, like a tiger pelt.

Or perhaps a glorious Carnival mask, orange and black and with areas of iridescent blue, using a painted weft with the black warp. Throw in some wildly colorful feathers and it could be a lot of fun, too. Heck, it could be the basis for an entire series of pieces!

I will have to think about this.

Of course, I will have time to think about it. Lots of time. After all, I have 2,640 threads to tie on. After about 45 minutes of work this morning, this is where I stand:

Lease sticks at the back of the loom, with warps ready to tie on and a few warps already tied on

Americans of a certain age*** may recognize the tune I’ve been humming to myself:

“2,640 threads to tie on,
2,640 threads to go,
Take one down, tie it around,
2,639 threads to tie on!”

There are, of course, a thousand variants to the verses, which is good, because I suspect I will have sung every one of them at least twenty times by the time I am actually done!

***do schoolkids even know the song “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” anymore, in this anti-drug age? And who on earth ever came up with the idea of having a bus full of 8-year-olds belting out what is clearly a drinking song at the top of their lungs on their way to every school field trip??

While on the subject of 3rd grade bus trips, here’s another earworm (this to the tune of that endless, how-on-earth-did-summer-camp-counselors-survive this?-song, “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round”):

“The shafts on the loom go up and down,
Up and down,
Up and down.
The shafts on the loom go up and down,
All over town.

The shuttle in the hand goes through the shed,
Through the shed,
Through the shed,
The shuttle in the hand goes through the shed,
Til weavers go to bed.”

And with that, I’ll get off to my own bed and spare you any more terrible weaving songs!

March 31, 2021 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

41 miles of yarn

41.47 miles, actually, according to my calculations, but who’s counting?

Three-quarters of it is hand-painted, the other quarter is black. There are two warps.

Here’s the one for Maryam, the one you saw in the last blog post, finished and ready to go. I think it’s breathtakingly beautiful and can’t wait to weave on it!

"Fire" warp for Maryam — “Fire” warp for Maryam

It’s set up for double weave – one layer of warp will be black, so I can weave any color in combination with black, and the other layer will be the “fire” warp, in all its glorious shades of orange, red, and yellow.

The black warp isn’t as limiting as it sounds – by weaving a very weft-dominant fabric, I can actually transform it into virtually any other color. It will have dots of black in it, to be sure, so very light colors would be difficult to achieve, by medium to dark colors wouldn’t be too hard.

This warp is 2,680 threads (2,640 plus 40 extras to cover breakage), each of which is about 15.5 meters long. That’s 41,540 meters, or about 25.8 miles of yarn.

This warp is simply “Fire.”

And here’s the warp for Grace – that’s the sample warp for the Color Gradients class. I’m calling it “Gradients” for short. (You can attribute the names to a plethora of imagination – hey, I’m pre-coffee!)

Gradient warps for Maryam — gradient warps for Maryam

Each of the warps is about 12.5 meters long – 4 wraps round my 3 meter circumference mill, plus a few inches more traveling down the length from top to bottom of the mill and around the warping pegs. There are 1,760 ends (threads) in the warp, and it’s set up for double weave. The bottom layer will be 880 threads – that’s the big warp on the left – and the top layer will be three side by side sections of about 290 threads apiece. Those are the smaller warps. Put together they will allow me to weave gradients in whatever color sequences and weave structures I want, three color combinations across.

The Gradients warp is also not a traditional painted warp. Most painted warps are designed to blend colors into each other at the boundary between colors, to give a painterly effect. With the Gradients warp, I basically want to simulate solid colored warps, so I want abrupt, synchronized color changes across the entire warp. I want to weave multiple solid color samples on the same warp, so the goal is to get the color changes to line up precisely so there’s no waste. This is a bit of a trick.

What I did was wind the warp and tie it off while it was still on the warping mill, using ikat tape and a guide string to make sure that all the ties were in exactly the same place along the warp on every bout (or as close as I could get, anyway). This, at least in theory, will make sure that the color changes line up with each other.

It was difficult to show how this works because the color areas are relatively long in the warp, but I spread it out on a table and lined things up as best I could:

painted warps lined up so the color changes synchronize — synchronized color changes

It’s not perfect, but you can get the idea – the color changes synchronize across the length of the warp, so when Warp One changes colors, Warp Two (and Three, and Four) changes color at the same time.

The ikat tape (the plastic stuff wrapping the warp at the color changes) is designed for, well, ikat weaving, in which portions of the warp are bound off before dipping in dye (usually indigo). The bound areas resist the dye, creating patterning. Since ikat tape is specifically designed for this kind of work, it’s perfect for my much less stringent needs. (If you’re wondering where I bought it, I got it from John Marshall’s booth at Convergence. I don’t think he sells it mail-order, though, so you’ll have to try to catch him at a show. Before I found it I used Dharma Trading Company’s artificial sinew, which also works, though not as well.)

Here’s a closeup of the ikat tape, showing how it binds the warp and prevents the dye from running between sections:

ikat tape bound section of warp — ikat tape-bound section of warp

That probably doesn’t look that interesting if you aren’t a dyer, but if (like me) you’ve spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to keep one section of a painted warp from bleeding into another, getting that sharp and clean a demarcation between sections is nothing short of amazing. The Holy Grail, achieved.

The other secret is to blot excess dye out of the warp after painting. I can’t believe it took me that long to figure it out. The few resources on warp painting I could find all said simply to put on enough dye to cover the warp but not so much that it was dripping. I have never been able to reach a happy balance point where the dye reaches full coverage but doesn’t run more than I like it to during batching or steaming, so if avoiding running is critical, I blot my warps with a bit of paper towel after painting to pick up excess dye. It shouldn’t be dry, but it shouldn’t be dripping wet, either. No more problems!

Here’s what the warp looks like after the ikat tape is removed:

warp immediately after removing ikat tape

See how clean the line is?

And here’s the warp after it’s been spread out and fluffed a little:

fluffed out warp showing white areas where the ikat binding was removed

Obviously the white sections can’t be used in finished samples, but if I’ve done my job right, they should be lined up pretty closely so not much yarn should be wasted. I’ve budgeted about six inches of waste per color for the synchronization, which should (at least in theory) be plenty. It’s not actually completely wasted because I can use that section for testing, refining, and sampling the weave structures and stripe patterning for that particular section of samples. That would be waste in any case, so it all works out in the end.

I wound up with a little lagniappe at the end of all that warp-winding and dyeing. I had mixed up four gallons of dye for all that warp – which I knew was overkill, but dyes are relatively cheap, and running out of dye midway through painting a warp section would have been disastrous. (Let’s not even go there.) When I have excess dye, I simply add to my wardrobe. 90% of the time I run around in tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans, basically because if you’re a five-foot tall woman, with broad shoulders, and can deadlift 245 pounds and squat 200+ pounds, nothing off the rack is going to fit you anyway. And I live in California, where nobody dresses up for anything. So when I’m dyeing, and I have leftover dye, I just grab some T-shirts and some short-sleeve, button-up men’s shirts (that’s what passes for formal wear around here 😉 ), and throw them into the leftover dyes. I generally do low-water immersion dyeing, because it takes five minutes and no brains to dye a shirt and the results usually look great.

And here’s what I got out of it:

That’s the formalwear (hey, it’s California!), and I’m madly in love with all three of them, especially the fuchsia/orange and the blue/green shirts. Heck, all three are wonderful. It’s hard to pick a favorite.

Then there are the T-shirts. I’m less enthused by them, not because they aren’t pretty, but because the colors aren’t really “me”. This one, for example, is pretty, but far too conservative for magpie me:

And this one is a little too chartreuse (in real life it is brilliant yellow-green with patches of bright and rusty orange):

Fortunately, though, Jamie fell madly in love with the last T-shirt and immediately carted it off to her lair, so everything has found a home except the red-and-blue T-shirt, which I will probably give away. I have lots of T-shirts already, and T-shirts are cheap at about $2.50 apiece, so one more or less makes very little difference. And the excess dye got used!

Next step is to put the warps onto the loom. Jamie and I spent a full day over my vacation (I’m back to work now) swapping out the guts of the looms – we still need to rearrange some parts, which I’ve ordered from Tronrud Engineering in Norway, but meanwhile I can get started beaming the warps, and threading up Maryam. With 2,640 warps to tie on, that’s going to take quite awhile. And after that, I’ll need to thread 1,760 heddles on Amazing Grace. Better find some good audiobooks!

March 26, 2021 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Warp painting, slightly unconventional

I’ve spent the last few days painting my warps. Five warps, actually, though only two warps after they go onto the loom. Four of them are going onto Grace as a single sample warp. It will be double weave, three warps going as bouts in a single layer side by side, and the other in the bottom layer. The other is going onto Maryam, as one layer in double weave, with the other layer in black, as the “art warp”.

Today I’m going to talk about the process for Maryam’s warp, the “art warp,” as Grace’s warp is way more complicated to explain and I think it will be easier to explain once the warp is actually on the loom. So here it is.

The conventional way to paint a warp is to stretch it out on a table and paint it crosswise in stripes of solid color. This produces horizontal banding of solid color, kinda like this:

a piece woven with a painted warp — conventional painted warp

This is pretty, but not at all what I wanted. I wanted a warp with random variations in color, in all the colors of fire, like the orange splotches in this swatch:

swatch from my piece "Bipolar Prison" — swatch from “Bipolar Prison”

To achieve this effect, I used threads of different size and different fiber types, so they’d absorb the dyes differently and also have physical texture due to the different thread type. So I set out to do the same with this warp.

I wound the warp with one strand of natural (unbleached) 10/2 cotton, which is about 4200 yards per pound, one strand of bleached 20/2 cotton (8400 yards per pound), one strand of 4-ply silk cord (8500 yards per pound), and one strand of natural 60/2 silk (15,000 yards per pound). Scoured, soaked, and stretched for dyeing, it wound up looking like this (luscious!):

To get the variegated effect I was after, with patches of subtle shading, I painted it with four colors: lemon yellow, gold, orange, and diluted scarlet. I wanted the overall color to be yellow-orange, and I wanted a lot of color blending. I diluted the scarlet because I know from experience that scarlet is a strong color, and also that orange is a mix of 80-90% yellow/gold and about 10-20% scarlet, so if I wanted orange-red I needed very little scarlet indeed!

I started by applying splotches of lemon yellow. You start by applying the weakest color, mixing-wise, because as you apply more color, the brushes will pick up previous colors and contaminate the colors in the bucket. If I’d started with scarlet, the brush in subsequent colors would have picked up bits of scarlet from the warp and dumped it into the lemon yellow, turning it into orange in no time flat. I didn’t want that, so I started with lemon yellow to keep it pure. Scarlet will barely notice if you add lemon yellow or orange to it, so I put it last in the queue.

Here’s the warp after applying the lemon yellow:

warp with splotches of lemon yellow dye — warp after applying lemon yellow dye

Next I added splotches of gold dye. I applied these two colors very heavily because I wanted to make sure there was no white left in the warp, and both these colors are relatively weak relative to orange and scarlet. If I soaked the warp in gold and yellow and then added a bit of orange and scarlet, the warp would wind up yellow, orange, and scarlet; if I tried using orange, gold, and yellow in equal proportions, the orange would overwhelm the gold and yellow, producing a warp that looked almost entirely orange. If I added scarlet in equal proportions, it would overwhelm everything else. So: mostly gold and yellow, first.

Now it was time to apply the orange. Because orange is so much stronger than yellow, and because the warp was already quite soaked with dye at this point (encouraging the dye to “run” along the length of the warp), I dabbed on only bits of orange here and there:

warp with dabs of orange dye — orange, freshly applied

If I had stopped here, the orange would have run slightly but there would have been distinct patches of pure orange dye. This is not what I wanted. I wanted a blended look. So I quickly squooshed (that’s a technical term 😉 ) the warp with my fingers to distribute the dye before it had a chance to bond much.

Here it is after squooshing:

orange, gold, and yellow warp, after squooshing to distribute the orange a bit — orange, gold, and yellow warp post squooshing

This warp is fine so far as it goes, but it lacks a feeling of emotional tension. It could use a trace of something a little darker to add a bit of value (light/dark) contrast. Enter the scarlet:

warp with dots of scarlet dye — dots of scarlet

You’ll notice I kept the dots of scarlet quite small. That’s because they are supposed to be dots of shadow, sort of like highlights but in reverse. I didn’t want them to be a big part of the design.

Of course, now the warp looks like it has measles. Worse if you look at the whole thing:

entire warp plus table — warp with measles – highly contagious, keep back!

(You’ll notice that the dye “studio” now looks like a total mess. I told you that neat look would last about ten seconds!)

The cure for warp-measles, of course, is more squooshing. The sooner, the better.

squooshed warp, with scarlet — Squooshed warp, measles magically cured!

When you paint a warp, you always want to flip it over to check for white spots. I flipped it, touched up the back with more dots of yellow, orange, and scarlet (mostly orange and scarlet – there was plenty of yellow), and squooshed again. Then I flipped the warp back to the front. By this time, the scarlet was becoming very nicely distributed:

Now I was done painting that section of warp, and ready to pull the next section up for painting. To keep it under control, I chained it – essentially, crocheting it – like this:

You would NEVER EVER EVER want to do this with a conventional painted warp because the colors would bleed all over and contaminate each other, but with this particular warp, I wanted color blending, and the colors all blend gracefully, so it made sense to chain the warp. Chaining it helps keep the warp threads aligned and prevent tangling later.

Here’s the finished warp:

You may be wondering about the white part. That’s the back end of the warp, which won’t be woven because it’s loom waste – the part that is stuck in the heddles at the end and can’t be woven. Dyeing it would be a waste of time and dye, and leaving it undyed makes it easy to identify which end of the warp is which.

I finished yesterday afternoon, which means I can start rinsing the warp later this morning. Because fiber-reactive dyes are so tenacious, rinsing is a 1-2 day process. Looking forward to seeing what it’s like once it’s fully rinsed-out and dried!