Tien Chiu

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New loom, and an interesting class

It’s been awhile! I’ve been in a slump, weaving-wise, mostly because I’ve been teaching, which leaves time for basically nothing else. Also, I have to admit that I’ve been sulking on the Fire warp, because after tying 2,640 threads and then discovering I’ll have to completely redo it, well, wouldn’t anyone?

In the meantime, I’ve decided that I want to play a little bit with shaft weaving. I’ve realized that TC-2 jacquard looms have their limitations, and one of them is that they really don’t deal well with complex color patterning in the threading. That’s because they adjust the sett by dropping out threads. If the warp is solid colored or very simple color patterning (alternating colors, for example) that’s fine. If the color patterning is more complex than that, however, it will destroy your carefully arranged colors. So if you have to do any sett adjustments, you’re in trouble.

Because of that, I concluded that I do want a shaft loom for playing with complex color patterned shaft-woven designs, e.g. warp gradients with multiple color gradients (two color gradients I can do on the jacquard), echo weave, etc. I’ve done some work on Ruth, my 8-shaft Baby Wolf, but in the process, I’ve realized once again that I really don’t enjoy weaving on tied-up treadle looms.

So (history repeats itself!), I found and bought a new-to-me 24-inch, 24-shaft AVL Workshop Dobby Loom, which I flew out and purchased last Saturday and which is en route via UPS as I type. She should arrive on Tuesday, and I’m looking forward to weaving on her! Breaking with my mathematical tradition, I’m naming her Iris, after the goddess of the rainbow. I figure that’s a good patron for a color teacher.

What to put on her first? Not sure, but I may start exploring echo weave. I’ve never done anything with echo weave yet, but I’ve been curious about it for ages.

In January I’m starting a new class, not weaving related but which promises to be extremely interesting. It’s the altMBA, put on by Akimbo, a company started by Seth Godin, who is an Internet marketing guru I’ve been following for quite some time. Seth is of the (very strong) opinion that modern education has it all wrong: it’s about creating conforming, compliant workers rather than leaders. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc for his excellent 15-minute TED talk on the subject.) The altMBA is his 1-month workshop answer to the MBA: the kinds of things the MBA should teach. It’s not about teaching particular topics: it’s about how to think about various business-related topics. You get thirteen “prompts” over 31 days, and you work on them in small groups with your cohort. I had wanted to do it for years, but until now I never had enough unstructured time to do it. But here I am, and I’m doing it starting January 17th.

What made me decide to do it was seeing one of the prompts, on decisionmaking. The description itself is 9 pages long, all packed with brilliant insights. It starts with the point that making a decision is a choice in itself, and not making a decision (or deferring a decision) is a legitimate choice, but one that should be taken consciously, not just “kicking the can down the road” because we’re sticking our heads in the sand. So look for unmade decisions.

Then, there’s the point that good decisions are not the same as good outcomes. Good decisions are ones where you used the right decisionmaking process and had good data. Good outcomes are where you got lucky and things turned out well.

Then they talk about sunk costs – the cost of prior decisions that may bias our next decision even though they’re irrelevant now. And then the importance of how you frame the problem, with examples.

And then they have you reflect and discuss several past decisions – both yours and others’ – before tackling a decision that you yourself are facing, with specific guidelines and insights about the decisionmaking process.

You write up your thought process and decision, post it in the discussion forum, and get at least 5 comments back from people in your discussion group. Then, two days later, once you’ve had a chance to think about what they’ve said, you post your reflections in the forum.

And then you write up and ship another prompt. Every 2-3 days you do a prompt, for 31 days.

What I love about the idea of this workshop is that it isn’t teaching you how to do things. I can figure out how to do things. How to do things is easy once you figure out the right Google search term and find the right class or YouTube video. How to think about things is hard, and that’s what I think the altMBA is teaching.

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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!