Tien Chiu

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Rites of passage

Not quite six years ago, I decided to walk away from my old life.

I realized that my twenty-year career managing software projects, while lucrative, was not fulfilling. Actually, let me be blunt: it was crushing my soul.

I was fortunate enough to have enough money to make a career transition, and to take some time to decide what to do next.

Of course, figuring out what to do next wasn’t going to be easy. As I wrote in my blog post “Chrysalis”, announcing my decision,

What to do next? That’s more complicated. I’d love to work in the craft arena, because that’s where my heart is. However, creative pursuits, particularly craftwork, are notoriously underpaid. And the San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live. That means I need to earn enough to pay my share of a Silicon Valley mortgage, since we have no intentions of moving. That makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to make my entire living from working in craft or craft publishing.

Well. You know what happened next. After six years of working my ass off, working harder than I’d ever done before in my life, I’ve arrived at a point where I can, in fact, pay my half of the mortgage, working as a weaving teacher. This is what I had dreamed I might be able to do, but not expected – how could anyone possibly expect that? – and, well, here I am.

And now Janet Dawson and I are on our way to fulfilling another of my dreams – founding an online weaving academy, where weavers who want to learn how to weave better, and to design their own work, can do just that, in a supportive community of teachers and weavers. I won’t go deep into our plans, but let’s just say that this is what I desperately wanted when I was a beginning weaver, and we are carefully designing and planning a school that we think will be a huge benefit for the weaving community, in addition to being a decades-long career for both of us.

At this point I feel like I have finally made the transition from software project manager to full-time weaving teacher/entrepreneur. The door is finally closed on the previous chapter of my life, and I’m starting a new one.

So it’s time for a rite of passage.

This one’s a curious one. I had never really thought about the prospect until a few months ago – it was always “something for other people”.

Then, sometime in June, I thought, “It’s time. I want a tattoo. A phoenix, rising from its ashes.”

The phoenix, of course, has been my unofficial personal symbol for quite some time. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to reinvent myself, either because of the bipolar disorder or because of some other disaster or sea change in my life. But after weaving a phoenix for my mother’s passing, and rebirthing myself out of the ashes of a previous career, I feel like it’s something that connects me to my personal power, and to the spirit of powerful change. There’s a lot of that going on in my life right now, so I want something permanent to mark that passage.

It’s not that different from the scarification that used to happen with manhood rites, except that in this case it’s something I’m doing for personal, not tribal, significance.

I’m going to put it on my right upper arm – I’m right-handed, so that’s a place that feels powerful to me, and it’s also a good place to put a tattoo to keep it protected from sun and chafing, which will help keep it from fading. I can also decide whether I want to show it or not.

The artist I’ve chosen to have do the tattoo is Tadi, a Korean artist who’ll be visiting San Francisco as a guest artist for three months. Here are two examples of his work on Instagram, which will give you an idea of his style:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CRL1bQBLiF7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUNRO8xJqF0/

And the inspirational photo I sent him, which is about the size and pose that I’m thinking of, is this one:

Tadi will be drawing a custom design for me, of course, and we’ll be finalizing the details a day or two before my tattoo appointment. That’s November 30 – a week and a bit after I finish teaching Gorgeous Gradients.

Frequently Asked Questions

Aren’t you worried you might regret this later?

Kiddo, there ain’t much I’ve done in the last six years that I might NOT have had serious reason to regret. Starting with walking away from a job that paid comfortably into six figures for a VERY uncertain and unproven financial life as a weaving teacher. Also, deciding to stay married when my wife came out as transgender three years ago, despite being a heterosexual woman who thought she’d married a man. Also, deciding to change from the solo weaving career to starting a weaving academy. Also, see my entire past history.

I’m not an irrational risk-taker, but the whole point of this tattoo is to celebrate the culmination of a high-risk move that, with a ton of very hard, very carefully thought-out work, has proved tremendously rewarding. There are reasons that I might decide against it, but concerns about future regrets aren’t one of them.

But tattoos fade. Aren’t you worried that it’s going to look ugly in 30 years?

Well, first, I’m 51. I’m not interested in winning beauty contests now (though I am tempted to enter powerlifting contests – I’d be third in the state of California for my age group if I did!), and 30 years from now, I’ll be 81 and (I hope) even less vain about my appearance.

Second, I did think things through, and did some research. Of all the tattoo colors, black fades the least. Fine lines, such as Tadi uses, do eventually fade away (we’re talking 15-20 years though), but they can also be retouched by another tattoo artist, so I’m not worried about that. The fine lines will also spread and fuzz out slightly, but since the lines are mostly used to create shading, again, not a big issue. Finally, how much abrasion, sun, wind, etc. the skin gets has a big effect on the longevity of the tattoo. So my choice of the upper arm is great – it’s a well protected area and doesn’t rub against clothing much.

And, if all else fails, black is also the most easily removed color for laser tattoo removal.

Aren’t tattoos just a flash-in-the-pan trendy thing?

According to Ipsos, 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo, so apparently I’m not particularly hip and trendy by getting one. (Sigh.)

What do the cats think of your getting a tattoo?

Hey babe, keep handing over those cat treats and you can do whatever the heck you want with the rest of your time!

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Cat-iversary!

Today is a day of celebration! Huge congratulations to Tigress and Fritz, who exactly eight years ago came home from their first successful hunt. And what a hunt it was! They “bagged” not just one, but TWO humans to adore, worship, and serve them for the rest of their lives.

Here are the mighty hunters the evening they arrived:

Fritz and Tigress as kittens

And here they are a few days ago, snuggled up together:

Fritz and Tigress snuggling
Snuggly cats!

Fritz still loves his belly rubs:

Fritz flopped over demanding a belly rub
Belly rubs are therapeutic!

And Tigress still likes to sleep at the top of shelves. (It’s nice to have friends in high places!)

She’s very Zen, so perhaps she’s engaged in sectarian dialogue with HH the Dalai Lama while she naps?

Tigress sleeping on a shelf above a postcard of the Dalai Lama
Tigress the Zen kitty

As a spiritual master, Tigress would be the first to tell you that if you love something, you must let it go free. If you don’t, how could you chase and kill it again???

Tigress hunting a feather toy
Tigress hunting

Yes, it’s been eight wonderful years. Eight years of being sat on, meowed at, mercilessly ordered to hand out the cat treats, and subjected to arbitrary demands from a tyrannical and utterly marvelous pair of cats. Here’s to many more years of “supervision” from our wonderful cats, Fritz and Tigress!

Fritz and Tigress providing supervision for some quill-winding

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Bright shiny new projects, weasel update

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been sulking on the Fire warp. It’s hard to keep up enthusiasm when two months’ work has been stripped away, just like that. It’s especially hard to keep up enthusiasm when you’ve also just had a huge load of extra work dumped on you by a new business direction, especially if it’s super exciting work that you’ve dreamed of doing for at least a decade.

Hmm. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say “I’ve been discouraged on the Fire warp, and distracted by a bright shiny new project.” Okay, I’ll go with that. Alas, I can’t reveal the new project yet, and probably not for a few months. Let’s just say that Janet and I are going all-in on a new business project. We’re tremendously excited about it and we think the weaving community will be too.

However. When you are teaching one class, preparing two new classes for release in the fall, and getting ready to start a new business venture for launch the following year, it means you’re just a wee bit busy, work-wise. I’ve been working six days a week, 10-12 hours a day, which leaves very little time for anything else. I’m hoping to have a little more time once Discover Gradients and Gorgeous Gradients are over….in mid-November. Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to keep up with the produce from the garden, and (yes) doing a little threading on the Fire warp, in my scraps of free time.

I’m pleased to say, though, that the tomatoes are doing well. I’m growing a couple of Fruity Mix plants this year, and they’re just starting to bear. (Long-time readers will recall that this is the tomato variety I resurrected from the dead several years ago. I’ve sent seeds to a number of plant breeders to keep it from getting lost again, so I feel like I’m off the hook for making sure the gene survives – now I’m just growing it for fun.) Pictures in a few more weeks, when more tomatoes are ripening.

I’m also pleased to say that the weightlifting is back on track! Jamie and I were lifting at home during COVID, using an Olympic weightlifting bar and weights that we had thankfully purchased BEFORE everyone and their kid brother was trying to buy them. As a result, we stayed in good condition during the plague, and after going back to our trainer, we’ve been making rapid progress. I am now lifting over 1000 weasels in both deadlift and back squats! (For those who missed it, when I started lifting three years ago, I decided that it would be far funnier and more motivating to measure my progress in weasels rather than pounds – read this hilarious blog post to find out why.)

Okay, okay, if you aren’t familiar with the weight of a Standard Weasel (which I admit I made up arbitrarily – for some reason, the National Institute of Standards and Time never wrote back when I asked them the weight of a Standard Weasel), a Standardized Least Weasel (the most common kind of weasel) is four ounces, so 1000 weasels is 250 pounds. At the moment I can squat 255 pounds (1020 weasels!) for 10 reps and deadlift 255 pounds for five reps. Doing just ONE rep would have put me third in my age class in the USA Powerlifting California championships for those lifts had I competed in 2019 (the last meet before COVID). And that’s in a normal workout (lifting multiple times, not just a single rep), with no special training, standing around in running shoes. Competition weightlifters typically use special shoes and a weightlifting belt.

Anyway, apparently I am lifting at a pretty elite level now. Looking back on when I started three years ago, my goal was to lift 700 weasels eventually. I have now blown COMPLETELY through that. Heh. Who knew?? Apparently being short and wide is good for SOMETHING, finally!

(My bench press numbers are not nearly as strong, though. Apparently I have legs and core of steel but wimpy arms and chest. I need to work on that!)

Pix next time I’m at the gym!

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The weaving gods giveth, and…

….human error taketh away.

After about two hours of pulling through knots, I ran into a snag: the knots weren’t pulling through properly.

So I moseyed around to the back of the loom, where, much to my distress, I found this:

orange warp looped around black warp

Somehow, I had managed to loop the orange warp around the black warp before starting to tie on.

Which meant that I had a major topological problem on my hands. To fix it, I was going to have to cut off, unloop, and retie that entire section of the orange warp, which meant about 2/3 of it. 880 knots, at least.

Since it was going to be difficult, fiddly, and error-prone to retie only the orange-warp knots and not the black-warp knots, it was probably going to be much safer to retie all of the warps on that side. 1,760 knots.

So I did the only reasonable thing, which was to put down the scissors, back slowly and carefully away from the loom, and go have a stiff drink. (Well, a cup of hot chocolate, anyway. I can’t drink alcohol – all it does is make me throw up. Which is a pity, because a couple shots of good whiskey were seriously called for.)

After a couple of days, I came back to the loom, spent a couple hours carefully pulling back and snipping out the knots I had just spent two months tying, un-looped the orange warp, and prepped the warp for re-tying.

Then I looked at the remaining tied-on warp and realized that there was a mis-ordering of the warp in that section as well. It’s a subtle problem, but you can see it in this photo:

twisted warp chain

As the warps come off the warp beam at the bottom, the black warp is on the inside. But as it passes over the back beam at the top, the black warp is on the outside. It’s twisted.

This might not actually be a problem if I removed the lease sticks holding the threading cross – the threads would straighten out their own ordering and all might be well (I’m not good enough at 3D visualization to tell). However, the lease sticks are my insurance against complete disaster should something turn out to be wrong with the threading. Had I removed the lease sticks before discovering the loop mentioned above, I would be throwing away the warp right now because I would have lost the separate threading cross for the two warps. So no way, no how am I giving up those lease sticks, at least not until I have woven and debugged the warp and made completely sure that everything is working.

However, that means I have to – you guessed it – retie the ENTIRE warp, not just two-thirds of it.

Time to put down the scissors, back away again, and go have an ice cream sundae. With hot fudge and whipped cream, dammit. (Hot chocolate wasn’t going to cut it this time.)

So here I am, two months’ work down the drain, starting over.

Oddly, I am not as discouraged as you might expect. I am also not engaged in self-recrimination. Twenty years of professional experience as a project manager has taught me that disasters happen, and also that there is no utility in pointing fingers when they do. The important part is doing damage control, figuring out how to recover from the disaster and proceed onwards, and (after all that is done) figuring out what happened and how to keep it from recurring. Twenty years of keeping teams from blowing up at each other in the middle of a crisis (and fending off angry executives) does teach one something about staying calm and carrying on.

So: damage control is done, I’ve figured out what needs to be done and am doing it. How it happened? Mostly, it happened because I’m not very good at spatial thinking, and I didn’t check carefully enough that there weren’t any loops or twists BETWEEN the two warp chains when I was setting them up. I’ve never beamed two warp chains onto the same warp beam before, and while I was very careful to make sure there were no twists in each warp chain, it didn’t occur to me that they could be twisted or looped around each other. I left the raddle lease sticks in because they weighted the warps nicely for threading, but they obscured my view of the warp, which meant that I didn’t see the loop in the warp until too late. As far as the left-hand twist went, I just didn’t notice it, or didn’t think it was important, until too late. Next time I know to look for it, and I’ll be much more careful about checking the entire path of the warp from the beam to the heddles while tying on.

I do, however, need something to motivate me while I spend (probably) another two months tying on again. So I’ve gone out and bought a couple new books to continue expanding my interest in folded forms. The one that’s currently exciting me is a book by Paul Jackson, Folding Techniques for Designers. Here’s a pic of the cover:

Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form

The whole book is filled with intriguing sculptural forms that can be folded from paper. I imagine I could use stiffened or stitched cloth to create similar sculptural forms. I’m planning to order some heavy bull denim and try starching it to see whether it would be suitable for folding. Or I may weave some 20/2 cotton cloth on the Baby Wolf and try using that for folding, until I can weave something on the jacquard.

I am not sure whether that is compatible with my California fire season theme, but at the moment I’m brainstorming ideas freely, so I’m not wedded to the California fire season theme either. I did see one or two forms that might work well with that theme, though, so I’m not ruling it out either.

So….major setbacks this week, but also some major sources of excitement. Onward and upward!

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Bursts of inspiration

At long last – and almost exactly two months after starting! – the Fire warp is tied on:

Fire warp, completely tied-on

Due to a miscalculation on my part, I was 16 threads short at the right edge. No real problem; at 90 threads to the inch, that’s only about 1/6 of an inch. I’ll just leave those heddles out of the design. Somehow, I think 2,624 threads will be enough. 😉

Now it’s time to start weaving, right?

Not so fast. Now all 2,624 knots have to be pulled through the heddles. This is a slow and tedious process (since when was any jacquard process ever fast?), because, while you can’t really see it in the photo above, the tied-on threads look rather like a rat’s nest, all jumbled together. At a density of 90 threads per inch, pulled through teeny tiny heddle eyes, that poses quite a daunting tangle.

As a result, all 2,624 threads need to be pulled through, one by one. Yes, I said one by one. I’d love to do them all at once, as I gather you can do with thicker threads and bigger heddle eyes, but at 90 ends per inch and with my tiny heddle eyes, I’ve never been able to do it successfully without doing every thread separately. Cue another 8-10 hours of sitting there, pulling each thread individually.

And then! You get to do it AGAIN, because even after all that the threads aren’t perfectly aligned. They catch on each other as they go through, and wind on each other, and generally misbehave. So even after you’ve done it once, you have to go back and do it again to catch the strays. Again, a tedious process and I’d love to find shortcuts, but I haven’t found any yet. Slow weaving. You can see why I put on very long warps!

Here’s where I am now, after about two hours of work yesterday:

Fire Warp, about 1/4 pulled through

I forgot to mention that some knots will come undone partway through the process, and occasionally a thread will break. After tying a couple thousand knots, I’ve gotten VERY good at tying them, but I’ve had two or three give way or thread breaks so far. These will have to be found and fixed later.

This whole process, by the way, is MUCH faster on Grace, because she is threaded at only 60 ends per inch, and the threads are much thicker. Much of this pain is self-inflicted, by threading with fine yarns at 90 epi rather than 60. But, the results are beautiful and (hopefully) worth it.

Anyway, after both iterations of pulling through are done, I’ll have to sley the reed, and then it’ll be time to tie on, weave a short header, and begin debugging. Which means I am still a good 15-20 hours away from actual weaving. However, considering that I’m at least 30 hours into the process, being this close is a HUGE milestone! Super excited.

I’m also SUPER excited because being this close means I can start planning my project in earnest. I think I’ve decided on a theme for the project: the cycle of the California seasons and how the wildfires are getting worse in response to global climate change. And I’ve decided on an overall interpretation in cloth: cloth that changes color, going from green with orange flecks (poppies) to yellow to flaming orange to black ash and back to green again, in a cycle. The cycle repeats itself, with the green areas gradually getting smaller and yellower, and the orange and black areas getting bigger. And the format will be three-dimensional, I think, some sort of book format.

What that format is, I don’t yet know. I spent part of this morning paging through the book Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures, & Forms by Alisa Golden, looking for inspiration, and madly sticking in Post-Its wherever I found something interesting. I’m also thinking a kinetic origami sculpture has possibilities.

I’ve talked a bit about my theme. Here are my practical constraints for the format:

  • It needs to be easy for a conference to display. That means not overly large, especially if three-dimensional.
  • It needs to be shippable and not take up too much space for me to store afterwards. Collapsible would be really nice.
  • It needs to be static, since people won’t be able to touch it while it’s being displayed. So, they won’t be able to appreciate moving parts, or be able to flip the pages of a book (for example).
  • It needs to be describable in one photograph, two at most, since that’s all I get for the entry for a juried show.
  • The piece needs to stand on its own with just the title to explain. Not all fiber arts shows include artist’s statements – and most importantly, if I recall correctly, Convergence doesn’t.

These constraints mean I can’t do something like a bound book, because people can’t pick it up and flip the pages. I can’t make a long, skinny accordion book, because those read horizontally and are hard to display. (I can make a long scroll, because hanging vertically is easier than displaying horizontally.) I can make a pop-up book but I can’t make one where opening and closing the book is important to appreciating the pop-up.

In addition, I need to be careful about things where the front and back are both important, because it’s difficult to display those on a wall (where most items are hung in a show) and if you only get one photograph for a show entry, how are you going to show both front AND back in a single photo? (You can do a composite, sure, but most shows don’t allow any Photoshop work on the entry, so you’re dancing on thin ice there.)

But even within those constraints, there’s plenty of room for creativity. I’m planning to spend today exploring some of the possibilities. While pulling through another 600 threads or so.

Off to breakfast! Gotta pull threads while the sun shines.