All blog posts | Tien Chiu's Blog

September 26, 2020 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

New studio!

The Great Studio Move is complete! I spent two weeks schlepping stuff into the 8′ x 16′ storage container, which was completely full when I finished. Then I spent a week obsessively moving, sorting, and rearranging things in the garage. I got rid of a LOT of stuff. Gave away, donated, threw out – probably about three cubic yards of stuff, or about half a small dump truck full. I eliminated two whole shelving units’ worth of stuff!

I don’t have a “before” pic (frankly, it was too much of a cluttered pigsty to show to my best friend, let along anyone else), but here’s a pic from just before the insulation installers arrived. Grace is on the left, Maryam on the right.

Here’s the studio now, completely reorganized, seen with the big garage door open:

view of studio from the front of the garage — studio, viewed from front of garage

I’m still decluttering a bit; the stuff in the foreground will be going away soon.

Here’s the studio viewed from the side door:

A view of the studio from the side door. Maryam and Grace, my two looms, are facing each other. — studio, viewed from the side door

The studio looks pretty industrial, but that’s kind of inevitable when it’s in a garage with unfinished (but insulated!) walls, and sharing space with a home gym. At least black rubber mats are covering the concrete floor! It makes it much more comfortable to walk/stand on, and protects the floor against dropped dumbbells when weightlifting.

(Someone asked how many weasels I can lift now. Alas, I can’t do squats right now because we don’t have a squat rack at home, but we do have an Olympic barbell, and I’m pleased to say that despite COVID I can still deadlift 900 weasels! (That’s 225 pounds, for you non-weaselly folks.) That means I can go around picking up guys – that is, if they aren’t too heavy and are willing to lie around on the floor in a convenient position for deadlifting. (Hey, you gotta start somewhere. 😉 ))

As you can see, I turned Maryam around so she and Grace are now facing each other. I figure that way they can chat while I’m not around. 🙂

If you’re wondering what the gray thing on the floor in front of Maryam (left-hand loom) is, it’s a Topo Mat by ergodriven. It’s the best ergonomic floor mat I’ve ever encountered, and if you’ve got a standing desk, you should run, not walk, to your keyboard and order one immediately.

The funny knobs and things are designed to give you lots of different surfaces/angles to stand on to encourage you to shift your weight about as you stand. With it, I can comfortably stand all day long (barefoot!) at my standing desk, or (in this case) weave all day long standing at Grace or Maryam. No more back problems for me!

The one downside to the Topo mats is that they are very comfortable. Very, very comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that Someone has taken to napping on them:

Tigress sitting on my Topo ergonomic floor mat — My human thought she was clever, getting rid of the chair…Ha! Just because you don’t *have* a chair doesn’t mean I can’t still steal your chair.

Curses! Foiled again. And here I thought leaving the old chair around to sit on would keep the Queen and Mistress of the Universe satisfied. Tigress is far too clever a cat to fall for that trick, apparently. (Because half the fun is inconveniencing the human.)

Fritz, meanwhile, is not to be outdone. I was doing a photo shoot for the next Weave-Along (which launches in a week or so). I had closed the door to keep the cats out, but – like the Australians building their famous wall to keep out the rabbits – had neglected to notice that there was already a cat in the room. Fritz helpfully pointed this out to me shortly after I started shooting photos, and provided some assistance in setting up the shots. For some reason, the human was singularly unappreciative of his efforts, and he shortly joined Tigress outside the photography “studio”, but I did get a lovely photo of him in the interim:

The garden is going well. I just harvested five pounds of potatoes – about half the potatoes from this variety – and made five pints of intensely flavored Concord grape jam from our Concord grapes. I divided and replanted Egyptian walking onions and garlic. And I’ve harvested quite a few passion fruit this year (unlike the last few years when we got almost none)!

The best news for last: I cleared enough space in the garage to make way for a small treadle loom! Yes, that’s right – despite having two jacquard looms, I want a small treadle loom. There’s something enjoyable and peaceful about having a wooden loom, so a Baby Wolf is on her way to me! She’ll arrive on Monday. Pics, of course, on arrival. 🙂

Finally: I’m still clearing out space. I was trying to sell the tjaps as a single group, but that doesn’t seem to have worked, so I am now offering them individually for $50 each plus shipping (the “going rate” for good quality copper tjaps is $90 or so, and the animal tjaps I have are hard to find). Here are three photos of the groups – if you like one particular tjap and want a closer look, close-up photos of each tjap are in this Google Drive folder.

(Tjaps are copper stamps traditionally used for batik, but they can also be used with paint and lots of other things, or just collected as decorative items. They are beautiful!)

If you’re interested in one or more of them, email me at tien@tienchiu.com. If you want three or more, I’ll cut the price to $40 each – I really want to reclaim the space!

If you’re local, I also have a Bernina 830 Record sewing machine (the mechanical 830, not the electronic one) with lots of extra feet that I’m offering for $600. Pix here and here. I’ll throw in a homemade double-ended electric bobbin winder and a DeLonghi steam iron with separate boiler if you buy it. If no one local wants it I’ll consider shipping (at buyer’s expense).

I’ll conclude this post with an intriguing photo from the garden. Culinary ginger isn’t as showy as its ornamental counterparts, but I think its flowers are quite beautiful nonetheless. This photo is of the pots by the back door:

culinary ginger blossoms — (culinary) ginger flowers!

More on Monday, when the new loom arrives!

August 29, 2020 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Catching up

Well. It’s been awhile.

I’ll plead that it’s been a busy time. I co-taught an online Weave-Along to 3,000+ weavers (that was fun!), and have almost finished co-teaching an eight-week online class on weaving with your stash (we’re in week 7 of 8). Now I’m gearing up for the launch of a new Weave-Along in October, for which the only hint I will give is this:

"All my yarn sparks joy" mug on three mug rugs

Between teaching the current course and preparing for the new one, I’ve been hopping!

But that’s not my only project. We’ve been upgrading my weaving studio! We finally installed air conditioning in the house this year, and we added a unit in the garage. But in order for the unit to work effectively, we needed insulation. The insulation installers arrive September 10…which means that EVERYTHING needs to be out of the garage by then (except Grace and Maryam, who are too big and heavy to be moved).

So we got an 8′ x 16′ storage pod dropped off in the driveway:

Giant storage pod being dropped off by a truck

and I have been moving stuff into the pod, sorting as I go. My goal is to get rid of a lot of it, in hopes of making room for a small folding floor loom, perhaps a Wolf Pup or Baby Wolf.

I’m taking the opportunity to rearrange my garage studio. I’ve wanted to rearrange it ever since I got Maryam, but never did because it would have meant moving everything out of the garage and then back into it, not to mention moving both Grace and Maryam – a Herculean effort. But, since I have to move everything out anyway for the insulation install…now’s the time!

Here’s the new studio layout:

I spent quite a bit of time on this. Things are complicated because we had to put in a home gym due to the pandemic, which takes up quite a bit of space. Fortunately we live in a temperate climate, which means that the Olympic bar for deadlifts can live outside on the patio (not looking forward to lifting outside in the dead of winter, though). And Grace and Maryam both take up a lot of space. But I got it sorted out eventually. If I can get rid of one utility shelf, I’ll replace it with the loom.

The garden is going well – here’s a picture of some of the current bounty:

Concord grapes, peppers, tomatoes, purple potatoes

Concord grapes, Nadapenos (heatless jalapenos), mini bell peppers, assorted tomatoes, and Huckleberry potatoes, which are purple with yellow insides, low glycemic index (for potatoes – this is strictly relative!).

If anyone is interested, one of the things I’m trying to destash is a collection of beautiful Indonesian tjaps – used for batik printing. I have something like twenty or thirty of them, mostly animal themed ones (which are hard to find). I will be selling them for less than half the price I bought them for, and if you buy them all I’ll sell for substantially less than that, so a real deal. If you or anyone you know might be interested (they’re collector’s items as well as dyeing tools), please email me at tien@tienchiu.com .

Here’s a pic of one of the tjaps:

And another:

That’s it for now! I’m hoping to post a bit more as things wind down with Stash Weaving Success.

June 29, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Happy 50th to me!

Today’s my 50th birthday! Happy half-century to me.

I had hoped to spend this day somewhat differently, but the pandemic got in the way. A party with all my friends, perhaps, to celebrate two important milestones: First, a half-century of life, a milestone that I had never expected to reach, because I grew up with bipolar disorder, spent about a third of my teens and twenties battling suicidal depression, and never really expected to reach thirty. And yet, here I am at fifty, still kicking, and (with medication) in great mental health. Miracles do happen. (As they say: It gets better.)

Second, with the launch of my last class, I feel I’ve successfully transitioned to making a living as a weaving teacher. Which is to say, the classes I’ve been offering have finally been popular enough, and sold well enough, consistently enough, that I’m reasonably confident I can make a living teaching weaving. It’s not just a fluke; I won’t get rich, but I’ll be able to pay my bills doing this.

So, two HUGE milestones for me today.

In lieu of a party, however, I’m celebrating the next best way: Taking a day off from the teaching business (which I haven’t done in heaven knows how long), puttering around the house, and doing only fun, “me” stuff. It’s been ages since I’ve had this much free time, and I’m loving it!

I’ve started by making myself a birthday cake. Lemon cheesecake, from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. Cheesecake is one of my favorite desserts ever, and this is my favorite cheesecake, hands down. She observes that cheesecake is basically a custard (it’s thickened with eggs), so by baking it in a water bath, as one does with custard, you can get a cheesecake that is wonderfully creamy from edge to edge, without that dried-out, caky edge that is unfortunately all too common. Swoon. It’s in the oven right now. Of course it will have to cool and then be chilled for several hours before it’s ready to eat, but hopefully by bedtime I’ll be able to have a slice.

I’ve also finished reading a fabulous soon-to-be-released book by Virginia Postrel. It’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, available for pre-order from Amazon. I got my hands on a review copy from Virginia, and I have to tell you, it’s one of the most fascinating and compelling books I’ve ever read on the history of textiles. If you thought Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years was interesting, you’re gonna swoon over this one. I think it’s actually even more interesting than Barber’s book. Run out and preorder your copy now. (I’ll write a more detailed review later, once it gets a bit closer to release.)

I’m currently in the midst of reading another fantastic book that I’ve been awaiting impatiently for months:

That’s right – Wendy Landry’s long-awaited book on weaving velvet is finally available!! I had asked Jamie to preorder it for me from Amazon, and (with amazing timing) it showed up just in time for my birthday. I’ve been eagerly devouring it. It’s re-sparked my interest in velvet-weaving. I still have no idea how I’d get space behind my loom for the velvet cantra, but perhaps someday….I love the design possibilities of velvet and really want to try weaving it!

Meanwhile, just in case you didn’t have enough home-grown fruit, I had just enough Santa Rosa plums last week for a plum pie:

A bit tart, but delicious, especially with vanilla ice cream!

Finally, Fritz would like you to know that he takes his job as Studio Inspector very seriously. He hasn’t yet decided whether he approves of this new swift. (But I’m using it anyway.)

Off to celebrate some more!

June 20, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Whew! What a month!!

I know I’ve been delinquent with the blog updates. I’ll plead that it’s been quite the month! Fortunately, in a very good way.

Janet Dawson and I decided to team up and teach a weave-along about weaving from your stash. We thought we’d get five hundred, maybe a thousand students, tops. Instead, we had over THREE THOUSAND WEAVERS sign up!! We were delighted, but also a wee bit overwhelmed. As a result, we both more or less dropped off the map for about a month.

I did get the sample warp onto the loom and weave the first set of samples for Tourmaline Butterfly. I was doing a rendition of this image:

image of butterfly wing — butterfly wing

The concept is that the cape, when the arms are spread, looks like butterfly wings, with dark green veins coming out from the body of the wearer and ending in the border of dots. The interior of the “wings” portion is intensely colored and shaded out towards the veins to give a dimensional effect.

For the folks who like technical details (if you don’t, just skip to the next paragraph): in all the samples, I used a point threading and a networked rosepath treadling in the pink areas (the tie-up is twill), and a brick-like fancy twill pattern in the green areas. It’s double weave, so the pink is one layer and the green is another layer, stitched together periodically so the fabric comes out as a single layer.

As you can see, the colors are pretty disappointing. I was hoping for some nice hue contrast and a clear, distinct pattern, but there simply wasn’t enough value (light/dark) contrast, and the chunks of color blended into each other even from a relatively short distance, muddying the bright pink into a dull brown.

I sat down and thought about it. I was facing a difficult color dilemma. Green and magenta, the two colors in the bright part of my painted warp, sit opposite each other on the color wheel. That meant that practically any color I chose as weft would blend into a dull color with one or the other of them. The only two exceptions were yellow and turquoise, both of which were strong-minded colors that would shift the colors away from the magenta and green I wanted. And yellow in particular is a super-assertive color that would probably drag attention from the painted warp (yellow is such a diva!).

Nonetheless, I thought I’d give them a shot.

Sample #2 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with yellow, turquoise/blue, and olive green wefts.

None of these were what I wanted – the blue was about the same darkness as the magenta, producing a nearly invisible pattern. The yellow produced a bright result and a clear pattern, but HOO BOY!! took over the entire piece – entirely predictably, and not at all what I wanted.

I thought about it some more and eventually decided that this section was all about magenta, and it would be okay to lose some of the oomph of the green. So I decided to try a dark, dull magenta weft. Using a darker, duller weft is a great way to bring forward the colors in a painted warp (because the eye is more attracted to light, saturated colors), and using a similar color would reinforce the magenta.

This led me to Sample #3:

In the previous samples, I had felt that there wasn’t enough of the painted warp showing due to the shading from the center to the outside of each section (it goes from showing more weft near the outside of each pink section to showing more warp on the inside). So I switched it to showing mostly warp throughout the entire section.

But on seeing it, I decided the sample looked too “flat”. So I wove sample #4, which was Just Right:

Sample #4 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with dark magenta weft and shading towards the edges of each pink section

I like this sample a lot. The darker magenta weft gives it subtle motion without significantly diluting the intensity of the pink areas, and the very subtle shading from dark outside towards lighter inside of each pink area gives it a subtle sense of three-dimensionality. I think for the final piece I will want to make the weft a bit darker, but I will have to weave more samples to be sure.

At the top of the fourth sample is another experiment with a slightly more saturated pink weft. I don’t like that one as much; it looks brighter but not as rich as the one below it. That’s interesting, considering that normally I am a bright-color magpie!

So that’s the Tourmaline Butterfly update.

Meanwhile, other things have been happening!

Jamie and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary! Here we are together, after a wonderful take-out meal from Manresa (three-star Michelin take-out – only in the Bay Area!). Hard to believe we’ve been married for an entire decade, but it’s true.

And yes, 10 years since my handwoven wedding dress really kicked off my weaving career. Hard to believe I had only been weaving 2.5 years when I started it!

And here it is in its home at The Henry Ford museum, being shown to some visitors.

A volunteer there told me that most garments are stored hung for space reasons, but my dress is stored flat in a special, custom-built archival box. I’m glad to hear that they are treating it as precious; I’d like to think it will be preserved for many generations to come.

Finally, the fruit trees Jamie planted seven years ago when we moved in are starting to bear fruit. Lots and lots of fruit. I have been making pie:

Aprium (apricot-plum cross) pie with chocolate ice cream

And, of course, the first tomatoes are ripening. An eager-beaver Sungold.

Sungold tomato - first of the season! — First tomato of the season!

Finally, since no blog post would be complete without a cat, here is Tigress, Queen of the Laundry Pile. Because laundry is not truly clean until it has been liberally bestowed with cat hair.

Whew! What a post. But there was SO much to catch you up on!

May 10, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Tourmaline Butterfly (?)

After taking in quite a few suggestions, both here and in the Color in Weaving Facebook group, I’ve settled on a possible working title: Tourmaline Butterfly. The colors in the warp remind me of one of my favorite stones, watermelon tourmaline:

watermelon tourmaline crystal — Watermelon tourmaline. Photo by Rob Lavinsky.

I was thinking about how best to use the colors. Depictions of flowers seemed too literal and too specific for the way the colors flowed. I thought about doing a waterfall theme, but wasn’t happy with the feel, especially after looking at waterfalls.

Then I was looking at drafts on Handweaving.net, and stumbled on this gorgeous draft by Bonnie Inouye:

draft by Bonnie Inouye, looks like a stained glass window — Draft from Bonnie Inouye, Handweaving.net draft #60970

I love this draft. In particular, I love the blurry lines from the advancing twill design, which suggest a design in the distance, set against the sharp bars in the center. It looks like a stained-glass window. Or like a butterfly’s wings, with the soft colors against the sharp veining that holds the wings together:

monarch butterfly — Monarch butterfly. Photo by Erin Wilson.

blue morpho butterfly — Morpho butterfly (I think). Photo by Anne Lambeck.

I’m envisioning a three-quarter or full circle cape with the body of the garment in those lovely pink-and-green tourmaline jewel colors, and with dark green “veins” branching through the garment like the veins on butterfly wings.

As the wearer opened her arms, the “wings” of the butterfly would open, revealing the pink and green.

I’m also considering making the cape so that, when the cape is draped normally, most of what you see is dark green, and you only see the pink and green portions when the arms are spread. In that case I’d be tempted to name the piece Coronavirus Chrysalis. Or maybe just the far more timeless Chrysalis.

The downside to designing the cape like that, of course, is that nobody would see the beautiful pink and green most of the time. It would make a dramatic fashion show garment, but not a very interesting one otherwise….unless, of course, I put a design on the back, where the cape would lie flat, and put the dark green covering the “wings” of the cape.

So many possibilities!

I’m now about 2/3 of the way through tying on the sample warp. The pink and green areas are tied on, now I’m working on the green warp:

This warp is going onto Maryam, and is designed to test whether the pink and green painted warp areas will stay cohesive enough to look good when woven. Also to test the concept for the overall patterning. The warp is 3.5 yards long, and 14.5 inches wide.

Because Maryam is threaded up at 60 ends per inch rather than Grace’s 90 ends per inch, I’ve doubled up the threads to get a good solid cloth. So the resulting sample will be heavier and coarser than the final cloth, but it should still tell me everything I need to know.

Next step is designing the first sample. Bonnie’s draft won’t work for my purposes, so I’ll have to create my own.

Finally, outside, things are happening.

The tomatoes are shooting upwards. I’ll have to hang the trellises this weekend:

The mulberries are ripening. I shook the tree this morning, with very tasty results:

My ginger is sending up shoots. (This is culinary ginger – the stuff you eat. I mostly grow it because the leaves smell so wonderful when you brush against them. But it’s nice having ginger on the back stoop, too! At least I’ll never absentmindedly run out. I love Chinese cooking, so that would be utter disaster.)

And, finally, the yellow irises are flowering. I wasn’t expecting them to bloom this year – I only planted them last year, and the purple irises are already done – but they appear to be, ahem, late bloomers.

(And yes, orange California poppies and roses in the background. The roses actually bloom all year round, even in December. There’s just no stopping them!)

That’s it for now!