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February 10, 2019 by Tien Chiu 12 Comments

Garden beginnings

A bit over a week ago, the East Coast and the Midwest were seized in a polar vortex. It was colder in Wisconsin than it was in Antarctica.

And in California?

The peaches were blooming:

So were the roses, despite our winter pruning:

And the violets:

The violets deserve special mention. I love violets because I grew up on the East Coast. They are not native here, and in Sunnyvale, it is too warm, too sunny, and too dry for them. We have had to resort to extreme measures to keep them alive: a shady spot and daily spraying with misters to keep things moist enough for them to survive. Friends who visit from the East Coast take one look and say, “Why are you growing weeds??” Well, I happen to love these weeds. They were part of my childhood, and they are by the front door because they make me happy every time I see them. 🙂

At any rate, in California, the beginning of February can mean only one thing: Time to plant tomatoes! And so it began.

This year, because I was planting saved seed, and because I was planting seed from other seed savers, I decided to try something new: a hot-water treatment to kill fungi and other pathogens. To do this with tomatoes, you put the seeds in a hot-water bath at 122F for 25 minutes. This is hot enough to kill the pathogens, but not hot enough to kill the seeds.

So I got a sous vide cooker (because doesn’t everyone cook their tomato seeds sous vide?), got a bunch of paper tea bags, and set to work with my twenty or so packets of tomato seeds. (Lest anyone think I’m only growing twenty tomato plants – quelle horreur! – I’m actually growing 32 Fruity Mix plants this year, from 4 different seed collections, plus 10-12 other varieties, both for breeding and for breeding to my Fuzzy Mix plants, which will be sown about a month later. I plan to grow 60-70 plants total, though I will likely pull out all but the best ones later in the season.)

Here’s what my setup looked like shortly before plunging into the sous vide. The teabags with seeds are clamped together at the top to keep them shut, so the seeds don’t escape in the water bath.

And here they are in the sous vide bath (just as it was cooling):

I planted them in soil blocks, which are preferable to pots because the roots naturally air-prune, rather than reaching the sides of the pots and then circling around and around. The labels are printed on the nearly-indestructible labels I used for my dye samples, and will last through an entire season of sun, water, and slugs. (I tried paper labels once. Slugs ate them.)

I worried that the hot water bath might kill some of the seeds. Quite the opposite. Tomato seeds normally take 7-10 days to germinate. I came back four days later to find the first ones popping out of the soil!

A day later, most of them had germinated. Wow! I’m definitely doing that again next year.

My nefarious breeding plans for this year are primarily to stabilize Fruity Mix. This year’s batch had only three out of twenty plants with the intense, fruity flavor I remembered. I saved seed from those three plants and am growing 32 plants from that seed. I will save seed from the best of those plants, grow another 30-odd plants next year, and continue until I have enough stability in the line to feel good about sending it to others.

Fuzzy Mix, on the other hand, is stable enough to use for breeding work as-is. The flavor is terrible, though, so I want to breed it to a better-tasting tomato. My goal is a dwarf tomato maybe 18″ or shorter, with fuzzy leaves and beautiful fruit, that would make an attractive container plant – suitable for people who want a beautiful plant that also bears beautiful, tasty tomatoes. So this year I’m growing an assortment of tomatoes with small, yellow-and-red striped, tasty fruit. My intent is to breed them to Fuzzy Mix and see what happens.

I’ve also just gotten seeds for some fuzzy leaf, multiflora, red and yellow striped microdwarfs from another tomato breeder. Microdwarfs are very small tomatoes, that grow maybe 10-12″ tall, and multiflora tomatoes grow large bunches of tomatoes. These seem like great candidates for breeding to Fuzzy Mix, too – Fuzzy Mix could add drought resistance and additional fuzziness to the other characteristics, both of which would be good for a houseplant or patio plant. Also, smaller plants are better for me since I have limited space.

All the possibilities!

Finally, lest you think that I am the only mad-scientist breeder out there, I found these at the farmer’s market last week:

“I don’t know what they are,” said the vendor, “but I found them growing behind one of the labs. Want some? No one’s died yet…”

No, seriously. They’re pometrons. A cross between a pomelo and a citron. Apparently they’re mostly skin, like a citron, but the interior flesh is edible, like a pomelo. I’m going to try candying the peel. I’ve been so busy teaching my online course, though, that I haven’t had time to cut it up until today, so I have no idea what the peel tastes like. Looking forward to finding out!

Finally, I’m pleased to say that, after years of waiting, I finally have my first bergamot!

Bergamots are an ancient citrus, and the source of the special flavor of Earl Grey tea. Candied bergamot peel dipped in chocolate has been one of the signature flavors in my chocolate boxes for many years, and I made the candied bergamot peel myself. But sourcing fresh bergamots has been a huge challenge. After the third source dried up, precipitating yet another a frantic search for a new one, I lost my temper and got Mike to plant a bergamot tree. And so, three years later, I finally got my very first bergamot!

“But wait,” you say. “Didn’t you retire as a chocolatier last year?”

Well, yes. But my friend Chris is carrying on the tradition. And candied bergamot peel makes great fruitcake. I’ll find something to do with it, dammit – the stuff is delicious. And now I have my very own source!

February 5, 2019 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Velvet beginnings

Today is the Lunar New Year, a day of new beginnings. An auspicious day on which to share velvet beginnings with you!

First, there’s the loom. With heroic effort, Ricki and I (mostly Ricki!) have gotten the warp wound and beamed, rearranged the modules, and have started threading. Here’s what Amazing Grace (my TC-2 jacquard loom) looks like now:

A TC-2 jacquard loom with a few heddles threaded

As they say, a journey of 2,760 threads starts with a single heddle.

Ricki has been doing most of the work so far, but I’m planning to do a lot more threading soon. Ricki graduates in May, and most likely will leave the Bay Area shortly thereafter, so if I’m to uphold my side of the bargain and show Ricki how to weave a project on Grace, she needs to be fully threaded by mid to late April. Ricki’s not going to have time to do all that threading solo, so I’m going to pitch in and help. Done a little bit at a time, it shouldn’t be that onerous, and I’m confident that, with Ricki’s help, I can finish in time for Ricki to weave something on the loom.

I am grateful to Ricki for giving me the kick in the pants I needed to get started with Grace again. I have plans for some fabulous velvet weaving. Mike designed and 3D-printed me a velvet knife that would work with round velvet rods – it has a round channel with a scalpel blade centered in the channel. The round channel runs along the rod and holds the scalpel blade centered over the rod, so you can cut down the middle of the rod and the blade doesn’t roll off.

That’s probably hard to visualize, so here’s a schematic of the knife:

Instead of traditional velvet rods, I plan to use nylon monofilament – 150, 200, or 300 pound-test fishing line, straightened out in hot water. John Marshall put me on to that idea – apparently Japanese velvet weavers have largely switched to monofilament – and I’m eager to give it a try.

For ground warp, I’m using black 20/2 cotton from Lunatic Fringe Yarns. For the pile warp, I’m using rayon machine embroidery thread. I had impulsively bought a giant lot of it on eBay several years back – “giant” meaning over 220 king-size (5500 yard) spools that arrived in two huge boxes weighing over 65 pounds – so I have a more or less infinite supply, and a huge collection of colors. I haven’t tested them for lightfastness and washfastness yet, but the brand has an excellent reputation, and I’m only weaving samples at the moment, so I’m just “winging it” for now.

The plan is to use a black ground warp and my usual brilliant yellow/orange/red colors, perhaps with a hint of blue/purple to provide hue contrast, to create interesting velvet designs. I haven’t any concrete designs in mind, only exploration. I do, however, have a few interesting ideas I want to play with.

The first idea comes from a fabulous Japanese velvet that John Marshall showed me. It is a velvet woven with real gold thread – that is, precious metal thread made from real gold. Because the Japanese are, well, Japanese, though, the gold thread is placed in the ground cloth – behind the velvet pile. So it doesn’t show unless the cloth moves or is draped over something, spreading the pile threads apart and allowing the precious gold to glimmer through. (Not being modest to the point of stupidity, however, they do make the pile sparser than usual, so the gold becomes easier to see.)

Here’s one of the precious metal velvets that John showed me. See how the gold shines through the velvet pile as the fabric turns around the fold:

Photo of Japanese velvet woven with real gold thread in the ground cloth — Photo of Japanese velvet woven with precious metal thread (gold) in the ground cloth

Well, one of the more interesting yarns in my collection is retro-reflective thread. It’s the stuff they put on running shoes and safety vests, and it lives a double life: Boring gray by normal light, but blindingly bright when viewed in a focused, head-on beam of light, e.g. headlights.

Here are two photos of a sample I wove with the retro reflective thread. The first shows it in normal light. The second shows it with a flashlight directed straight at the sample. See how it glows in the second photo?

sample woven with retro reflective thread, in normal light

handwoven cloth sample woven with retro reflective thread, illuminated with direct lighting

So…now I’m thinking that putting retro-reflective thread in the ground cloth, behind a somewhat-sparse velvet pile, could produce some really beautiful cloth. Because its base colors are gray and silver, though, it would probably work better with blues, greens, and grays than with the fiery colors that I prefer…but there is plenty of time to experiment with the possibilities!

My other ideas are not nearly so concrete. I take a lot of inspiration from the Japanese velvet weavers’ design aesthetic. John Marshall very generously loaned me a large number of Japanese velvets, and my expert-photographer friend Lieven just as generously photographed them for me in meticulous detail. Here’s one that shows the power and simplicity I aspire to:

Japanese velvet piece showing red cut-velvet leaf design against uncut and voided velvet patterning

I love the understated elegance of this piece, and the virtuoso skill that lies under it. The red is cut velvet, the rest is uncut velvet. What I love is the restraint on the cut portions: only a few portions of the velvet are cut, with great precision, to create emphasis on the relevant design elements and create a sense of movement through the piece. The design looks simple, but if you look close up, you can see the complex patterning in the leaves – both the cut and uncut velvet leaves – and in the background.

(Do click on the image to see the full-size photo of the cloth, but only if you have a fast connection – Lieven’s photo is about 28 MB. But worth it – you can make out every detail of the velvet patterning, right down to the individual loops. Exquisite!)

Anyway, I don’t yet know enough about velvet to know what is and is possible, so my first plan is simply to explore the possibilities. Mike and I are going to have to figure out how to create the required velvet equipment ourselves, so part of the adventure will be figuring out how to create the weighted velvet spools, and the spool rack to hold them. Mike has 3D-printed some test spools for me already, and I have sketched out some ideas for a modular spool rack that would make it easy to switch out spools if I want to change colors, break a thread, double the number of threads in a pile unit, and so on. I expect a ton of technical experimenting will be needed before I can really start thinking about design – and I am looking forward to every moment of it!

Happy Chinese New Year to you all! May the coming year bring new beginnings to everyone, in all your ventures.

January 15, 2019 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Rhapsody on velvet

It started innocently enough. I was registering for Complex Weavers Seminars 2016, and I saw two seminars by Wendy Landry, on velvet weaving. “Velvet,” I thought. “Huh. That sounds kinda interesting. Not really my thing, but there’s nothing else compelling in that slot, so why not?” I signed up.

Well, Wendy’s lecture and samples blew me away. I wanted to weave velvet. But velvet weaving requires specialized tools, which I didn’t have. Plus I had just gotten a shiny new TC-2 jacquard loom. Velvet went on the shelf for several years.

Then Convergence 2018 rolled around. Barbara Setsu Pickett was offering a class on weaving velvet. I leapt at the opportunity.

Here’s the velvet sampler I wove in class, which shows just a few of the possibilities:

A bit of explanation before I walk you through the sampler: Velvet is woven on two warps. One warp weaves the ground fabric, which holds everything together. (In this case, it’s the gray fabric visible on the edges.) The other warp is the pile warp, which produces the fluffy bits that stick up from the fabric. (In this case, the pile warp is all the colorful parts.)

The fluffy bits are produced by lifting the pile warp and then inserting grooved rods under the pile warp to produce loops. Like this:

Velvet weaving showing rods — Velvet on loom, showing rods

In this case the rods aren’t grooved. They’re a pair of brass strips that are inserted together.

You weave a few picks (threads) of ground cloth, then insert a rod, then weave a few more picks of ground cloth, then insert another rod. Repeat until you have three rods. Then you run a knife through the groove on the rod (or, in this case, between the brass strips) to cut the pile warp, releasing the rod and producing the fluffy cut-pile ends.

Alternately, you can simply remove the rods and leave the ends uncut, leaving loops, called uncut pile.

Now, let’s look at the sample again:

The pile is purple and green cotton, plus orange rayon machine embroidery thread, which is much glossier than the cotton. The bottom part is 100% cut-pile velvet, using the brass strips. The next section is uncut pile (loops). In the third section, I decided to accentuate the fiery sheen of the loops of orange machine embroidery thread by cutting the green and purple pile to deepen their colors, increasing the contrast with the uncut pile.

In the fourth section, Barbara offered to let me use her velvet rods, which produced much lower pile than the brass strips. In the fifth section, I tried making the orange and purple sections taller by using the brass strips in those sections and Barbara’s rods in the green sections, but didn’t like the effect. In the sixth section, I made the orange and green sections taller and the purple sections shorter, an effect I liked much better.

This is all structurally simple: the entire area is covered in velvet pile. All that’s changing is the height of the pile, and whether the loops are cut or left intact.

Here’s some much more complex work, done in monochrome by people who actually know what they’re doing. This is Japanese velvet, from John Marshall’s collection of amazing Japanese velvets. Bad photo, taken with iPhone. (Next blog post will have lots more photos of amazing velvets, taken by my friend Lieven, with much superior camera and much superior photographer.)

This piece is technically relatively simple – next blog post will have much more technically complex work. But it is one of my favorites, and unfortunately it’s not one of the ones I borrowed from John, so this is the only photo I have. Let’s look at it a bit closer up to see what’s going on.

You can see that there’s an intriguing mix of patterning here. The flowers are outlined by areas where there is no velvet pile whatsoever (voided velvet), except for one flower in the top left which is left “blank” and outlined in velvet loops!

You can also see that the flowers are not all the same. The flower in bottom left is made up of rows of pure pile loops, whereas the two flowers in the middle are made up of pile loops alternating with areas with no pile. And the flower in middle right is made of 100% cut-pile loops, giving it a deep, sumptuous red color that instantly catches the eye. Luxury.

The overall effect is a wide variety of textures and colors – all done with just one size of velvet loops! And the cloth is just beautiful, expertly composed.

I aspire to do work like this someday.

I love the sumptuousness of velvet, and I also love the incredible variety and complexity of what can be done with even “simple” velvet – monochrome, one height of pile, cut vs. uncut loops. Throw in all the other techniques and the possibilities become endless. I could explore this for the rest of my life. Perhaps I will.

More photos of the amazing possibilities in my next blog post…

January 7, 2019 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Smashing the 1,000-weasel barrier – and still climbing

My trainer had me test my 1-rep max for squats the first time today – the maximum weight I could lift, just once, for that exercise.

Unfortunately we didn’t get quite all the way to my max – when we finished, I still felt like I could have done more weight. But we smashed through the 1000-weasel mark like it never existed. I squatted 1,060 weasels and felt like I could have done at least another 40-80 weasels!

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout…) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(For those of you not familiar with the weasel unit of measurement, there are 4 standard English weasels to the pound, so I was squatting 265 pounds and felt like I could have done 10-20 pounds more at least. And if you’re wondering why I’m measuring progress in weasels, check out this blog post about why weasels are way better than self-discipline!)

To put this in perspective, at the USA Powerlifting California competition a month ago, I would have placed fourth in women’s squats despite being 17 years older than the next oldest competitor (she was 31). Okay, the field was small (9 women). In the NorCal Powerlifting California state competition in July 2018 (the biggest competition that year), I would have placed third among all the women of any age or weight class in squats.

And I wasn’t even at my true maximum. And I’m 48. And I’ve been training for exactly 6.5 months as of today. Before that, I was a couch potato.

Dang. I got into this to lower my blood sugar, but you know, I think I might actually be a contender?

That said, I have a long way to go before I start winning powerlifting competitions. Powerlifting consists of three lifts: squat, deadlift, and bench press. My deadlift and bench press are quite weak, so I need to work on those areas before I’m ready to enter competitions (if I decide to do that).

But…I’m a LOT stronger than I ever thought I’d be.

Wow.

Onwards!

December 23, 2018 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Back to weaving soon!

Spoiler: Velvet coming to these pages soon!!

You may have noticed that there’s been no weaving content in quite awhile. This is partly because I’ve been crazy busy with developing and launching Color Courage for Weavers – working 12-14 hours a day for the last 2-3 months leaves little time for anything else. But it’s also because the warp that’s on Grace (my TC-2 jacquard loom) is incredibly persnickety and no fun to weave.

At the same time, rethreading a jacquard loom is not something one approaches lightly (read: without chugging a fifth of whiskey first), and since I just haven’t had the mental or emotional energy to deal with it, Grace has been sitting around moping for the better part of two years.

Hopefully, that’s about to change.

Out of the blue, I got an inquiry from an MFA student, Ricki, who wanted to trade studio assistance for training in how to use a TC-2. Now, I get this kind of request on a fairly regular basis, and I generally say no, because typically the person asking doesn’t have enough experience to make it worthwhile. However, Ricki is an MFA student with considerable weaving experience. They’ve been offered a jacquard residency at CCA, but CCA won’t teach them how to learn how to use the TC-2, so they have to learn how to use it first. Ricki sent an email to my weaving guild asking if anyone knew someone who owned a TC-2, and thus wound up on my doorstep.

This sounds like a wonderful trade to me. I still don’t have time or energy to rethread Grace, so having someone willing to spend the 20-30 hours needed to wind a 10-20 yard, 2,640-thread warp, beam it onto two warp beams (beaming a warp onto Grace bears a certain resemblance to watching grass grow), and then thread all her teeny-tiny heddle eyes, is manna from heaven. (Plus, Ricki is still young enough to chug that fifth of whiskey without regretting it for months afterwards.) And teaching someone how to design for and use a TC-2 sounds WAY more fun than sitting there doing endless threading.

From Ricki’s perspective, of course, it’s also a great deal, because TC-2s are rare, and getting a chance to learn all the aspects of how to use one, including threading one, is a pretty unusual opportunity. And I told Ricki that I’d be happy to let them weave on it as much as they wanted, if I weren’t in the middle of a project at the time – which is a VERY rare opportunity indeed. So it’s a good trade all around.

Now, what am I planning to weave? VELVET!!

I’ve gotten obsessed with velvet since my trip to John Marshall’s place. His collection of Japanese velvets is amazing. I’m going to rhapsodize over a few examples in my next blog post, and then obsess over a lot more examples in another blog post a couple days from now. They are gorgeous, demand virtuoso skills, and are also technically intricate – exactly the kind of work I live for.

Because I can’t wait that long to tell you about my new obsession, here is one small example:

Japanese velvet - Peony - cut vs. uncut velvet — Japanese velvet -peony

This is a lovely velvet that has been painted with dye after weaving. Looks nice, right? But look at the white bits, the highlights on the peony. That’s not paint. That’s areas where the loops of velvet pile have been left uncut. (If you click on the image to get the big image, and zoom in, you’ll see little loops in the white areas.) The artisan used the fact that uncut loops of thread are more reflective than cut ends to create the highlights – not just in the big white areas but also in tiny little sections around the edges of each petal. Some of those areas are only a thread or two wide. Similarly, the veins in the leaves are created not with dye, but with uncut loops of thread. Cutting almost all of an area, but leaving 1-2 threads intact, requires amazing control over the velvet knife. Hats off to the artisan!!

And there is plenty of other virtuoso work in the Japanese velvets, but if I got started on them in this blog post, I’d never finish it. More in the next post, I promise!

I don’t plan to do anything that complicated, at least not initially. But I do plan to do some interesting experiments with velvet. This involves quite a bit of custom equipment, which is why most weavers don’t weave velvet. But Mike and I are hoping to change that. Mike is designing and printing velvet-weaving equipment for me using CAD software and his 3-D printer. Once he has the design down, and we’ve gotten them to the point where I’m happily weaving on them, we’re planning to publish the designs. That way any weaver can download them, have them 3-D printed, and start weaving velvet, too!