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June 14, 2017 by Tien Chiu 14 Comments

Marvelous Mandelbrot

I finished my Mandelbrot piece! It was astonishingly easy compared to my usual projects – one or two hours of design, about four hours of weaving, and I was done. Amazing Grace is magic! I’m tempted to put a license plate on her that says GEN II (the license number for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).

One thing I found interesting was the difference between a piece freshly off the loom and a piece that has been wet-finished. The difference in this piece was quite dramatic: In the wet-finished version, the warp relaxed and the wefts drew in together a little bit. This created much more intense colors.

Here are two photos of the finished piece. The top photo is the piece before wet finishing, and the bottom photo is the piece after wet-finishing. Neat, huh?

(There is a shadow on the bottom of the pre-wet-finishing piece (that was my camera), so look at the rest of the piece when comparing.)

Handwoven rendition of a Mandelbrot set, before wet finishing. Original image by Prof. Wolfgang Beyer.

Handwoven rendition of a Mandelbrot set, after wet finishing. Original image by Prof. Wolfgang Beyer.

Marvelous Mandelbrot is 9.25″ x 9.5″ and will be sold for $125 at Fiber Shots, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles‘ annual fundraising gala. It’s on July 22, 2017, 6 pm to 9 pm at the Museum. (The Museum is 520 S. First Street, San Jose.) Come, enjoy seeing all the work, and buy something for yourself!

June 13, 2017 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Happy anniversary to us! (And, the best gift ever!)

Monday was Mike’s and my anniversary – celebrating 7 years of wedded bliss. It’s been eleven years since we got together, and I love him more with each passing day. I’m so happy we met!

To demonstrate one part of why Mike is the best husband ever, the night before our anniversary, he presented me with this:

It’s a cone winder that he made for me. It uses two parts that I bought from a guy in Russia, and is based on some photos of working cone winders that the fellow in Russia sent us, but the actual design and construction comes from Mike’s ingenuity and mechanical skills.

And it is FABULOUS!! It winds skeins onto cones twice as fast as I could do before (I was using a double-ended electric bobbin winder with cone adapters), and creates beautiful, neatly wound cones. No more having loops of yarn flying off the end of a cone! This will massively speed up my dyeing process. And it’s a lot better than anything I could possibly buy. I think it’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten.

(That’s not why I married Mike – I married him because he is kind, generous, trustworthy, creative, funny, and thoroughly lovable (among a host of other reasons!) – but gifts like these are a nice bonus.)

Here are photos of two cones that it wound:

As you see, they’re wound as tightly and neatly as a commercially wound package of yarn. The purple cone is 3300 yards of fine silk; the tan one is 1650 yards. About 10 minutes to wind the tan cone, which is super fast.

I’m backed up on blog posts at the moment, so you’ll get one more tomorrow. The next one will be about a “quickie” I am weaving for a San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles fundraiser – a handwoven image of part of the Mandelbrot set. I wanted to create something that showed off the beauty of mathematics – and this one promises to deliver! Here is the original image (created by Professor Wolfgang Beyer, found on Wikipedia, and used under Creative Commons license):

Part of the Mandelbrot set; image created by Wolfgang Beyer

Some of the detail will be lost in translation, but I think it’ll be beautiful.

Finally, for those who asked about Fritz and Tigress – don’t worry, they are up to their usual antics. Here’s a video that shows Tigress going “undercover” to pounce on Fritz.

June 13, 2017 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Up and weaving!

First, the grand news: I AM ACTUALLY WEAVING!!! I have finished debugging both warp and loom and have started weaving the samples for Everett’s stole. Hooray!! Six months of threading and debugging are over, and I can finally weave on my beloved loom.

Here are the samples I’ve woven so far. Not that impressive looking, but still quite informative:

start of weave blanket for Everett's stole — start of weave blanket for Everett’s stole

This set of samples is testing out different combinations of warp and weft. There are four weft (crosswise) yarns being used: gold, orange, pink, and green. In the top set of samples (above the yellow line) I am experimenting not only with each individual color but also combinations of the colors; if you click through to the larger image, you’ll find that the row above the bright orange is a mix of bright orange and green, and the salmon-y shades in the same row are mixes of orange and pink.

I’m going to do a LOT of these samples. You’re seeing 24 samples (eight per row times three rows); I will probably make 100-200 of them. Then I’ll photograph all the samples and average out the color of each sample in Photoshop to a single color. After I have a large enough palette, I’ll reduce the image to just the set of sample colors, and use that image to generate the file for the loom.

Tedious and time-consuming, but well worth it in the end.

And…I AM WEAVING!! For the first time in six months. What a joy, and what a relief!

June 4, 2017 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Treats

After several days of hard work, I’m almost done debugging. It’s a dreadfully slow and frustrating process, that can take up to fifteen minutes per errant thread. I’ve fixed crossed heddles, stuck heddles, empty heddles, broken threads, crossed threads, etc. (LOTS of etc.). And then, after ten or fifteen minutes of concentrated troubleshooting, I get to move on to…the next problem. After an hour’s work, I might have fixed six threads – seven, if I’m lucky.

The pins in this photo show some of my pain:

This reminds me of something I’ve often said about my cats: they are the most amazing, wonderful, fabulous cats in the world, and I love them dearly – which is absolutely the only reason I put up with them. 🙂 Similarly, Amazing Grace is the most wonderful, fabulous, etc. loom in the world, which is the sole reason I haven’t chopped her into firewood while debugging. (Well, plus she’d make rotten firewood, given that she has a metal frame.)

Then yesterday, just as I was giving up in disgust for the day, the mailman arrived, with an intriguingly squishy package with a handwritten address. Since I hadn’t ordered anything recently, I was a bit puzzled by its arrival. What a delight to find a small package of black and white silk yarn and a note from Wanda (one of my Chocolates for Charity donors) gifting it to me! She said it was unlikely to use it, but she knew I would, so she was sending it to me. I will indeed use it, Wanda, and it was a delightful end to an otherwise frustrating day of struggling with the loom. So thank you.

The arrival of Wanda’s gift made me think, “Hey! Maybe I should give myself treats whenever I finish fixing a thread!” Bribery, of course, has a long and successful history, and since it works on the cats, I suspect it will work on me as well. (Because, of course, I am almost as smart as a cat, at least where treats are concerned. 😉 ) Since a friend gifted me with a box of delicious chocolate squares (from a chocolatier in Paris, no less!), I plan to munch my way through the next dozen broken threads.

And after I run out of chocolate? Well, the garden is bursting with tastiness. The aprium season has just started, and it promises to be an excellent harvest:

(If you’re wondering what an aprium is, it’s an apricot-plum hybrid – like a slightly tarter, but still luscious, apricot. They are one of my favorite fruits. Our tree is just a few years old, and is bearing quite nicely for its age.)

And the mulberry trees are still going:

I grew up with three big mulberry trees in our back yard – I have many fond memories of running around in the back yard under the trees, then coming in with purple feet, hands, and face. I’m very happy Mike planted mulberries for me.

Our raspberries are also burdened with ripe fruit – only a little this year, as the patch is tiny, but delicious nonetheless. In a few years, after the patch has expanded, we’ll have enough to make jam.

And did I mention the blueberries?

We have fragrant beauty:

And not-so-fragrant beauty:

And there is promise of more fruit to come. The grapevines are starting to set fruit:

And if you’ve ever wondered what a baby avocado looks like, wonder no more:

And there are passion fruit, persimmons, peaches, plums, and figs on the way, too. All that hard work Mike put in a few years ago is paying off in abundance now. I just hope we can keep up with the harvest!

And that is it for today…it’s time to get back to debugging! I’m down to three recalcitrant threads, so I hope to finish today.

Just to whet your appetite…here are some of the threads I will be using to weave my samples:

These are rayon embroidery threads designed for sewing machines…In the real piece, I will use hand-dyed silk threads, but rayon embroidery thread is available in a wide range of colors, making it useful for color sampling. With luck, I’ll be able to reproduce the colors in silk, using my large sample palette.

Stay tuned for some Actual Weaving!

May 28, 2017 by Tien Chiu 10 Comments

Designing Everett’s stole

Yesterday I worked for nine obsessive hours getting Amazing Grace ready to weave, culminating in this thrilling sight:

The warp is theoretically ready to weave, but in practice the next phase is debugging, which I expect to take a week or so. Debugging means finding all the broken threads, loose threads, sticky heddles, etc. and fixing them. For me, debugging is usually the most frustrating part of warping because I am so so so close to being able to weave, but countless small problems prevent forward progress. This time, however, I’m so excited about the prospect of Actual Weaving that I think it will go quickly.

Finishing the warping means that I need to start thinking about what to weave. The next piece is going to be a commission – a stole for Everett, who is training as a Unitarian minister and wants a stole for his eventual ordination. This is a very special occasion, calling for a very special piece. And I aim to deliver.

Back in January, Everett and I came up with this sketch:

Everett's stole - draft design — Everett’s stole – draft design

The design will actually be divided in half when worn, one half around each side of the neck. It will look like this:

Everett's stole - as worn — Everett’s stole – as worn

I’ve been thinking hard about the logistics of creating the stole. The first step is to figure out what colors I’ll be working with, and the overall structure. There are a lot of subtle shades in this piece, but it looks like I can create them all using mixes of eight weft colors: indigo blue, teal forest green, medium green, gold, orange, dusty lavender, and metallic silver. (I may throw in some navy blue at the very top, but haven’t decided yet.) I’ll be using four colors at any given time, rotating colors in and out as appropriate and interlacing them with a black warp. That will enable me to create a piece with literally hundreds of colors.

The warp is silk, alternating black and white, and is about 25% finer than sewing thread (for any weavers reading, that’s 60/2 silk). It’s sett at 120 ends per inch, suitable for double weave. I’m actually weaving the piece in two layers – the top layer weaving with the black warp, and the bottom layer weaving with the white one. The white layer will not show at all in the finished piece – its only purpose is to stabilize the wefts that are not being used.

I am mentally laying out the process for developing this piece. It involves developing hundreds of color combinations, and each color combination requires creating a separate weave structure. It also requires selecting, dyeing, and weaving samples with the hundreds of weave structures and all eight weft colors. Then I need to do some Photoshop work to convert the image into something weave-able. After that, I’ll weave selected parts of the design and make adjustments as needed – and I expect there will be quite a few of them. Finally, I’ll be able to weave the finished cloth.

And then, after that, I’ll be ready to make some muslins for the stole and sew the finished piece. While I’ll be careful, of course, I’m not that worried about screwing up – 90% of the time in this piece is in developing the design, not weaving it, so if I screw up I can re-weave the fabric in just a few days’ work. I’m estimating 15-20 hours to weave (for the weavers, that’s 12,000 picks), but that is dwarfed by the time spent designing and weaving samples.

Since this is only my second commission, I’m keeping a time sheet for the piece – so I can figure out what I’m actually earning per hour while creating it. Then I can adjust my rates for future work appropriately. (Given all the work involved, I suspect Everett will be getting a pretty good deal!)