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May 16, 2019 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Setbacks, explorations, and total world domination!

Sorry it’s been so long since the last blog post! An entire week of food poisoning has left me alternately sick and playing catch-up. But I have finally more-or-less caught up, and I have much to report!

First, I have finally finished sewing warp and weft swatches to my painted-warp samples, and photographed all of them with help from my friend/assistant Ruth. And, of course, from Fritz, who helped us set up:

Here’s the finished photography rig:

The lights are LED panels, a mix of yellowish and white LEDs, that allow me to adjust the color temperature of the lighting. For photography it makes very little difference since I can adjust the color temperature in post-processing of the photos, but it will make a difference when shooting video later. I switched from large compact fluorescent bulbs because I think I’ll get more even lighting (with less heat) from the LED panels.

You might have noticed that one of my other assistants was conspicuously absent from the photos. Where was she? Not to worry, she was providing critical assistance by protecting another batch of samples:

We had a fan going in the room, and it would have been tragic if the samples had blown away! So she sat on them to keep them in place, and nicely pressed to boot. Such a considerate kitty!

Meanwhile, you may recall that the tomatoes, three weeks ago, were happy, healthy little tykes. No more. They are now happy, healthy killer mutant ninja tomatoes, chanting FEEEED MEEEEEE!!! as they start flowering and preparing for Total World Domination:

The Fuzzy Mix aren’t quite big enough to start breeding to the other tomatoes, but in another day or two the flowers should mature enough for me to start attempting cross-pollination. This will be an adventure of a new and different kind! I am armed with YouTube videos and an electric toothbrush for pollen collection. All I need now is an “Evil Tomato Breeders for a Better Tomorrow” T-shirt. (Fortunately, I have a Thermofax machine, so I can screen print myself one in no time!)

(And yes, I have completely lost my mind. But you knew that already.)

Some of the tomatoes, however, are microdwarf tomatoes that I got from fellow tomato breeder Dan Follett. They will not be conquering the world through giant growth, but through petite adorability. This one, for example, is a fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf, and should top out at about 11″ tall. I find the foliage fascinating, and plan to try breeding it either to Fuzzy Mix or Fruity Mix or possibly both. I haven’t anywhere near the space to breed out all these crosses but oh my the temptation and the possibilities!!!

Anyway, I’m still playing catch-up from my week-long bout with food poisoning, so off I go again.

One more note before I go, though – health update is very positive! At my latest checkup with my diabetes pharmacist, she spent twenty minutes raving about how exceptionally well I was doing (“I never see numbers like these!”), and finally said I was doing so well that I didn’t need to see her anymore – I could just get my medication refills from my primary care doc. And I just got my blood sugar tested a few days ago, and my A1c (three month rolling blood sugar average) is down to 6.1, which is well out of the diabetic zone. This means my medication is working exceptionally well. I’ve also lost ten pounds in the last four months, which helps a lot as well.

Despite all that, I have not lost any strength – I can still deadlift 560 weasels (140 pounds), and squat 660 weasels (165 pounds), much to my (and my trainer’s) delight.

So while I intend to continue working at diet and exercise, things are going very well indeed. Hurray for that!

May 5, 2019 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Painted warp samples

Sorry for the long silence! I’ve been prepping for a longish vacation – nine days visiting friends and family on the East Coast. Just finished four days visiting my best friend Edouard in New York City, and now en route to Maryland for another five days with family. I’ll return home Thursday.

Since I’ve had quite a bit of travel time, I’ve been spending some of it finishing up the painted warp samples for my upcoming talk at ANWG. The challenge was showing how warp and weft colors interact to produce the finished cloth – particularly when the colors aren’t solid, and I’m using multiple structures in the same swatch.

Fortunately, I always dye a few extra warp threads when painting a warp to make repairs easy, so I had a bundle of eight or nine leftover warp threads when I was done weaving. I tacked them down at the boundary between weave structures, and ran a bundle of weft threads across the swatch to show the weft colors. Like this:

painted warp swatch with a bundle of warp threads running vertically and a bundle of weft threads running horizontally — painted warp swatch

I think this shows off the warp and weft colors nicely, and the swatch shows how they weave up together, both in a complex design and in a simpler one.

This particular (8-shaft) draft blends colors quite a bit. I’m doing another set of samples that uses the same threading and the same colors, but a VERY different tie-up that keeps the warp and weft colors largely separate. It will produce a vastly different look. The point here is that people often focus on the color palette, when structure is just as important. The color palette determines what color blends are possible, but structure controls what color blends actually appear, and what blends appear in which area.

I wove a surprisingly large number of samples on this warp. It was a 14-yard warp, and I got 32 samples out of it. I’ll be doing another 32 samples in an identical color palette using the other structure, which – added to the 20-odd samples that Laura Fry already wove for me – will give me about 80-90 painted warp samples for my seminar. I plan to weave another 50-60 for the online course I’m developing, but not until I get back from ANWG.

Here (purely for the eye candy) are a few more painted warp samples:

painted warp swatch in pinks and purples

painted warp swatch with dark blue mottled warp and pale pink weft

mottled blue painted warp with pale blue weft

The last two swatches demonstrate the interplay/trade-off between woven pattern and dyed pattern. In the blue swatch with pale pink weft, the high contrast between warp and weft makes the woven pattern quite prominent. So you don’t see much of the pattern dyed into the warp; it becomes a textural background to the pattern woven into the cloth.

In the blue swatch with the lighter blue warp, the warp and weft have much less contrast, so the pattern dyed into the warp is much clearer. But you can still see structural effects. The dyed pattern is much clearer in areas where the woven pattern is simplest. At top right, the simple zigzag makes it easier to appreciate the mottled blue dye job than at bottom left, where the diamonds push the blue mottling into the background as a textural effect. Neither effect is wrong – just different. Knowing how your design decisions play out in the finished cloth makes you a more effective designer.

I’ve been having a lot of fun looking at and analyzing my samples. Not just pretty cloth – informative experiments! Art science at its best. 🙂

More details and registration for my ANWG seminar on the conference website:
http://www.anwgconference2019.com/

April 23, 2019 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

More tomato madness

I just finished teaching my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course! Or rather, I finished releasing all the lessons and did all the live lectures – some students are still finishing the exercises, and I’ll be giving feedback on the exercises through June. But the bulk of the work is done, and from now on I’ll be working primarily on revamping the current course offerings, developing new courses – and, of course, taking over the world through my killer mutant ninja tomato breeding project.

Which is coming along nicely, thank you for asking!

My Fruity Mix tomatoes were a little unhappy and chlorotic when they were set out into the garden two weeks ago. They looked like this:

a tray of Fruity Mix tomatoes waiting to be transplanted — Fruity Mix seedlings on 4/6/19

Two weeks later, they have settled in, greened up, and are preparing to take over the world:

Fruity Mix tomato on 4/22/2019 — Fruity Mix tomato on 4/22/19

These are going to be a little crowded – I planted four per 30-gallon tub. My plan is to keep them pinched back to 2-3 stems each, and grow them up rather than letting them sprawl. My goal here is not to get a lot of fruit but to evaluate each plant for the quality of its fruit. I’ll likely cull a lot of the plants midway through the growing season, keeping only the best plants for saving seed. (And for tasty fruit!)

Because I decided to crowd the Fruity Mix four to a tub, I wound up having more space than I originally planned for. Which of course meant…more tomatoes! (I mean, what else would you expect me to grow?) So in addition to my 32 Fruity Mix tomatoes, I’m growing nine Fuzzy Mix (for breeding purposes…the fruits are essentially inedible), sixteen to twenty varieties for breeding (I kinda lost track of the exact number), and a bunch of microdwarf tomatoes, some of which are cool and exotic, like these:

A fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf tomato - with leaves so finely divided they look almost like carrot tops rather than a typical tomato leaf. Except they're furry!

This is a fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf. It’s hard to make out because of the fuzziness, but the leaves are very finely divided – beautiful and decorative! And it’s a microdwarf because it will get no more than 12″ tall. It’s a breeding project from Dan Follett – I’m growing it out partly to return feedback (and seeds) to him, but also to cross-breed it to Fuzzy Mix. I think it’s a beautiful little tomato plant! Can’t wait to see what the fruits look like.

The rest of the garden is going well, too. The garlic is growing like mad:

A big plot of garlic growing like crazy — lots of garlic!

The blueberries are blueberrying:

The asparagus is also coming up (in spades!), the aprium is loaded with green fruit, our bird-of-paradise plant is blooming for the first time since we planted it, and the roses are going crazy, but no photos of those just yet…It is full-on spring in California, and I am scrambling to get on top of the weeds, put in stakes and supports, and set up the drip irrigation!

I am also weaving samples like crazy for my painted warp seminar at the ANWG conference in June…but this blog post is long enough already, so I’ll write about that in the next one. Suffice it to say that I’m up to 55 samples already and expect to be well over 100 samples by the time of the lecture…and would like to have 200+ by the time I finish developing the online course. Because one can never have too many samples!

I’ll leave you with a teaser photo of the samples. A cat heightens the mystery!

Tigress sitting on my samples — Tigress helping photograph samples

April 16, 2019 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Robes of fire

The bathrobe is done, and it is GORGEOUS!! It will keep me toasty warm, mentally and physically, all year round:

bathrobe in fiery colors — robes of fire!

I’m particularly happy with how the pattern of the reds and oranges came out. Because I sponged on the red at the very top of the scrunched-up bathrobe, the red patches are centered in the most intense patches of orange, like this:

closeup of flame-dyed bathrobe, showing the intense patches of red centered in the patches of orange

This gives a really nice effect of real fire.

Compare this to the tie-dye towel from my initial experiment:

image of tie-dye towel with randomly painted lines

I tried the paint the lines to fall in the more intense areas of orange, but as you can see, it’s really not the same, and the bathrobe looks way better. Hurray!

The bathrobe inspired me, so last weekend, I hosted a small tie-dye party for some friends. I spent most of the time helping them with their tie-dyes, but took a few moments to make two scrunch-dyed T-shirts for myself – one in fiery colors, like the bathrobe, and another in yellow, orange, and black.

Needless to say, as soon as I laid down the first shirt to take photos, this happened:

photo of fiery-colored T-shirt with a photobombing cat (Tigress) — a photobombing cat!

I love the T-shirt! You’ll notice how it has much more detailed crinkling than the bathrobe. That’s because it’s a lighter-weight fabric than the bathrobe, so it holds tight wrinkles better – and thus produces a more detailed dye job. Not better or worse, just different.

The second shirt reminded me of Sharon’s comment on the previous blog post – “I think Tigress was born tie-dyed.”

I laid the shirt on the bed and snapped a photo of it next to Tigress. There is definitely a family resemblance between the tie-dyed shirt and Her Royal Highness – though, of course, there is no question about who is more fabulously beautiful!

Tigress with a black, orange, and yellow scrunch-dyed tie-dye shirt

Of course, if you take a photo of one cat, the other cat must photobomb. It is The Feline Way:

Fritz sitting on the T-shirt I was trying to take a photo of

Fortunately (for the human), His Royal Highness was just a moment too late – I had already taken the photo I needed. But I snapped a photo of him anyway, because how could you not take a photo of such utter cuteness?

And then, of course, he got a belly rub, because I have only One Job.

April 10, 2019 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Tie-dyed towels?

Honey, in this household, everything is tie-dyed.

(Except Fritz and Tigress. They run too fast.)

More seriously, I’ve been gearing up to tie-dye that bathrobe I mentioned a few posts back. And since it’s a big expensive project, that means I need to do samples! And what better way to sample for a big, sumptuous bathrobe than by doing some big, sumptuous towels?

I had been considering ice-dyeing this bathrobe, so the first step was buying 80 pounds of ice. 40 pounds for ice dyeing, and 40 pounds for rinsing out the tie-dyes afterwards.

(Dyer’s trick: do the first rinse of fiber-reactive-dyed items in ice water, to prevent unreacted dye from migrating and staining other areas. The ice bath chills the dye to the point where it won’t react in that rinse, and the ice water rinse removes the soda ash, so the dye won’t react in subsequent rinses either. Presto, your white areas stay white.)

I was thinking of two options. One was an indigo blue background and fuchsia/turquoise/purple patterning. The other was my usual favorite, orange and yellow background with red patterning. Ice dyeing would add randomness to the pattern, and variations in intensity – dark and light areas where the ice diverted or diluted the dyes.

Here’s an ice-dyed T-shirt I did in 2016 that gives you an idea of what you can get from ice dyeing:

So I made up a bunch of dyes and did the towels. I did one towel in navy blue, turquoise, purple, and fuchsia, ice dyed in a spiral – navy blue on the bottom and turquoise/fuchsia/purple on top. Then I did two more towels in fiery colors – one in an ice-dyed spiral with orange and yellow on the bottom and fuchsia/scarlet/orange on to. The other I dyed in a scrunch-dyed pattern with orange and yellow on top, and painted it afterwards with a network of red lines.

Here’s what the fiery-color ice-dyed spiral towel looked like after I piled ice on top and dripped the dyes on:

ice dyed towel in the process of dyeing it — ice dyed towel in progress

And here’s what all three towels looked like when done:

Blue, fuchsia, and turquoise towel — Sample towel #1 – blue, purple, fuchsia, turquoise

Tie-dyed towel - yellow-orange and scarlet-fuchsia ice dyed spiral — Sample towel #2 – ice dyed spiral in yellow/orange/scarlet/fuchsia

Sample towel #3 - yellow-orange with red lines — Sample towel #3 – side 1

Sample towel #3, the other side - yellow-orange with red lines — Sample towel #3 – the other side

Obviously (if you are me, anyway) the choice is #3. A dark blue bathrobe in the dark winter is a nonstarter – I’d want to shoot myself by the time January rolled around. And I didn’t like the cool reds or the way the ice diluted the color. A bathrobe the color of fire would be the perfect thing to warm me up during the (cough) freezing California winters.

So yesterday I soaked the bathrobe in soda ash solution, spun it out briefly in the washer, and arranged it on a baker’s full-size sheet pan. Like this:

bathrobe scrunched up on a baker's sheet pan, ready for dyeing — bathrobe, ready for dyeing!

Then I poured a quart of yellow dye onto the bottom of the sheet pan. Which vanished immediately.

I scratched my head, and mixed up another quart. Which also vanished immediately.

At which point I poured in a leftover pint of golden yellow. Repeat vanishment.

I abandoned subtlety, and mixed up half a gallon of yellow dye, throwing in another quart of soda ash solution just in case there wasn’t enough. I poured that into the bottom of the sheet pan. Take that, bathrobe!

Finally, I had yellow peeking up from the bottom, as I wanted. I started dripping on the orange dye.

Here’s what the bathrobe looked like now:

bathrobe sprinkled with orange and yellow dye

After sprinkling on the orange dye, I decided not to paint on the red lines but to try an experiment: sponging on just a little bit of red dye to create a tracery of red lines in the center of the most intense orange areas.

Here’s what the bathrobe looked like partway through the sponging process:

bathrobe sprinkled with orange dye, partially sponged with red dye — bathrobe, sprinkled with orange dye, partially sponged with red dye

And here’s what it looks like at the edge, where you can see all three layers of dye: red, orange, and yellow:

bathrobe - showing all three three layers of dye: red, orange, yellow

And what does the finished bathrobe look like? Tough noogies, sweetheart – the dyes haven’t finished setting yet, so I don’t know yet. It’ll be another couple hours before I can pull it off the tray start the rinsing process, and that will take another half-day or more. So I’ll be in suspense for another day or so – and so will you.

Perhaps this would be a good metaphor:

See you (and the bathrobe) tomorrow!