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December 8, 2018 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Color Courage for Weavers has launched!!!

After a week of nonstop preparation, I launched yesterday around 8am. The response has been phenomenal – over 500 people enrolled in my free mini-class so far, and quite a few enrollments in the paid classes as well.

I kept an eye on things for an hour or two after launch, then was so exhausted that I finally fell over and slept for several hours. Last week was so busy I’ve got a LOT of sleep to catch up on!

Oh, and my keychain? Here’s what it looked like yesterday around 7am:

And here’s what it looks like now.

Finally, after three years, I am really and truly done with the old life, and on to the new. And I cannot tell you happy and grateful I am!!

Here’s a copy of my launch email.

First, the headliner: Registration for Color Courage for Weavers – Basic and Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop is now open!! You can find out more about both classes by going to my courses homepage:

classes.warpandweave.com

Now…

You may be wondering why I’m so passionate about teaching color. The short reason is that I love color, but I had an AWFUL time figuring out how to use it, particularly in weaving. My early works – the pieces most people have never seen – are littered with color disasters.

So if you’ve had color challenges, I feel your pain. I spent years struggling to find good resources about color in weaving. There aren’t many of them, and there were even fewer when I was searching. I spent a lot of time bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out color.

Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

So when I lost patience and decided I was going to figure color out once and for all – weaving hundreds of color swatches and dyeing thousands of yarn samples in my quest to understand color in weaving – I wanted to pass that information on. I saw absolutely no reason why any other weaver should have to go through what I did.

And that’s why I created Color Courage for Weavers.

Color Courage for Weavers – Basic is an introductory course on color and design, meant for the weaver who is comfortable with choosing drafts and yarns for projects but is hesitant about color choices.

Color Courage for Weavers – Basic starts by covering the parts of color theory that are most relevant to weavers, illustrated with lots of handwoven samples. Then it moves on to explain the four design factors that I feel are most important in creating a project’s unique look and feel – again, with lots of handwoven samples. It explains how to control each design factor through choice of color, weave structure, scale, yarn size, and a few other factors.

Finally, Color Courage for Weavers – Basic addresses the design process, including tools for creating and testing your designs before you put them on the loom.

Color Courage for Weavers – Basic isn’t just meant to be absorbed passively, though I’ve created a discussion forum and sowed questions throughout the course that I hope will encourage you to reflect what you’ve learned, to think about your current design preferences and process, and share your thoughts with other students.

I feel that sharing ideas and inspiration with like-minded weavers, helping them solve problems and being helped in return, is one of the best ways to learn any topic. I hope you’ll jump in on those discussion prompts and join the conversation, and join the general discussion in the alumni forum at the end of the course.

If you are nervous about color, Color Courage for Weavers – Basic will help you transform that nervousness into confidence. You won’t know everything about color – frankly, nobody knows everything about color – but you’ll have the tools and knowledge to strike forth on your own, and you’ll have the company of other like-minded and knowledgeable weavers.

To sign up for the course, go here:

classes.warpandweave.com/courses/color-courage-weavers

Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop is for weavers with a similar level of experience, but who want to go deeper. You should be comfortable picking drafts, yarns, and setts to create a project.

While the instructional materials for Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop are the same as in the Basic course, you’ll get six sets of hands-on exercises designed to take you from a “book learner” to an experienced designer. I’ll give you feedback after each exercise, but I’ll also lead a class discussion about the exercise, encouraging everyone to reflect on their current design practice and how they can integrate their new knowledge to change that practice.

In addition to the exercises, you’ll get 12 one-hour weekly Q&A sessions with me to clear up any confusion or question marks that might arise. I’ll try to schedule those Q&A sessions to allow the maximum number of students to attend, but if you can’t make it, no problem – you can send your question in advance, and all the sessions will be recorded so you can watch them whenever you want.

At the end of the Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop course, you’ll have knowledge, design skills, and practice using those skills in designing real projects. You’ll also have an alumni forum where you can stay connected with, share inspiration with, and get/give help to similarly knowledgeable weavers.

Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop will help you “level up” from a technically competent weaver to a “pop, sizzle, crackle!” color designer.

To get more information and sign up for Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop, go here:

classes.warpandweave.com/bundles/color-courage-for-weavers-workshop

To celebrate the first offering for both classes, I’m offering an introductory special on both of them.From now until December 17, you can get Color Courage for Weavers – Basic at $30 off the regular price – follow this link for details:

classes.warpandweave.com/courses/color-courage-weavers

For the introductory class of Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop, I’m offering a $50 discount off the course price. Follow this link for details.

classes.warpandweave.com/bundles/color-courage-for-weavers-workshop

Don’t wait – registration for Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop is closes December 17! and the introductory discount on Basic ends December 17, too.

Happy weaving!

Tien

December 3, 2018 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Remove before launch

I’ve been pretty silent here for the last few weeks because I’ve been working like crazy on prepping my online course Color Courage for Weavers for its launch. (Coming up fast. Really fast.)

And I’m not going to say much right now because I’m still working like crazy trying to get the launch ready. You have no idea how many moving parts are involved!

But I did want to share one thing with you.

You may recall that, long ago and far away, I worked for a company called Skybox Imaging….which made, launched, and operated state-of-the-art, seriously bleeding-edge imaging satellites.

Well, when satellites are constructed, there are typically protective parts that are kept in the satellite while it’s being stored on Earth, but are removed just before it leaves the planet and goes into orbit.

So people don’t forget to remove those parts, they are typically tagged with big red labels that look like this:

So shortly after I joined Skybox, I got a “Remove before launch” keychain fob to commemorate the launch of our second satellite. The one that convinced Google to buy us.

After I left Google, I thought, “Remove before launch. Hey, that’s cool. I’ll just leave it on until I’m ready to launch my new business. That’ll be another six months or so.”

Then Life Happened. It’s now been on my keychain for over three years post-Google.

But…it’s coming off.

Within the next week.

Stay tuned….

November 17, 2018 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Presenting the 2018 fall collection

Alas, this is the last collection….the Chocolate Couture House of Tien has now officially closed. My friend Chris Cianci has inherited my equipment, however, and is gleefully planning to continue the tradition. In fact, he did much of the prep work this year, and since I threw out my lower back on the second day of Chocopalooza this year, he and the rest of my intrepid team of volunteers wound up doing most of the work, period. I cooked most of the centers (the flavor-critical parts); they did all the cutting and dipping. And they did a splendid job of it. I can retire from chocolatiering with a clear conscience, knowing the tradition is in good hands.

Here’s the Chocopalooza closing photo with me and Chris. I presented him with a heat-sensitive Star Wars mug when we were done, and poured a liberal dose of hot chocolate into it to make the light sabers come alive.

Use the Force well, young Jedi.

November 16, 2018 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Book review: Figuring Fibers

I have long wondered whether it was possible to create Art that expressed the beauty of science at a deep level. Most of the Art I’ve seen celebrating science has lain strictly at the surface – mostly, images of scientific concepts that happen to have aesthetically attractive representations. Fractals, various spirals based on the Golden Mean, microscopic images of cells, and so on. These are OK, I guess; they help make science more approachable, and they definitely demonstrate that science-y things can also be pretty things. But they don’t get at the true beauty of science, which for me is conceptual beauty, the sheer elegance of the rules underpinning the way the world is put together. I have never, for example, seen a work of Art that really expressed how elegant Maxwell’s equations, or the Pythagorean theorem, really are. Not their truth, or their usefulness, but their elegance: The simplicity and power with which they express their underlying truth.

It may sound odd to non-mathematicians or non-scientists to talk about beauty in a profession that is supposedly dedicated to truth, but the beauty of the truth, of the rules underpinning how the world works, is what gets most of us into the game. Particularly, it’s what gets mathematicians into the game. Because mathematicians work with abstractions rather than messy data, and because much of mathematics has no obvious application to the real world, mathematicians are in some sense the poets of the scientific world, seeking truth and elegance for their own sake rather than for any specific application. (This is, like most sweeping statements, an overgeneralization, but one with a reasonable degree of truth to it.)

The great mathematician G.H. Hardy, in his book A Mathematician’s Apology (one of my favorite books about the philosophy of mathematics), said this about mathematics, Art, and beauty:

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words…The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics….

It would be quite difficult now to find an educated man quite insensitive to the aesthetic appeal of mathematics. It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind—we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.

I’m not going to try to give a rigorous definition of mathematical beauty – it would be an interesting exercise, and Wikipedia takes a stab at it, but it would be kind of like trying to explain being in love to someone who’s never experienced it. Louis Armstrong once said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Mathematical beauty is somewhat similar.

Nonetheless, it exists, but it’s a conceptual beauty, and trying to render it in physical form is hard. Really hard. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was possible. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out how because I’d never seen it done.

Until someone told me about Figuring Fibers. Figuring Fibers is a compilation of articles that demonstrate mathematical principles using fiber arts in a deep, thoughtful manner. It’s unique in that it’s written with mathematical rigor, yet is readable by the sufficiently bold layperson, and each article covers a deep, interesting mathematical idea and then demonstrates it/extends the idea using a fiber art technique. Crochet, knitting, quilting, sewing, and beading/embroidery are all used in the book. (No weaving, alas, but perhaps a future volume?). This is no mere crocheting of a Moebius strip or knitting a 3D rendition of a Klein bottle; this is creating fractals, extending the Chinese Remainder Theorem to knitting contexts, and proving hyperbolic geometrical theorems through quilting. I mean, this stuff is cool. Way cool. As in, I had continuous nerdgasms for three days cool. (Okay, okay, TMI, but you know what I mean. 🙂 )

Figuring Fibers is definitely not your “Quilt in a Weekend” type fiber book, and it is not for those easily intimidated by mathematical notation. In fact, I opened it, looked inside, saw subscripts and superscripts and phrases like “Triply periodic polyhedra in Euclidean Three-Dimensional Space” and nearly shut it again. But I didn’t, and I’m very glad I didn’t. If you are mathematically educated enough to read Scientific American, and if you are willing to put some time and effort into understanding the concepts, you can skip over the more technical bits and still get 90% of what the authors are saying. There are definitely places where you’re going to get lost – at least, for awhile. And there are places where you’re going to have to go back and forth until you get it. But it is possible to skim over those parts and still appreciate how devastatingly cool (did I mention devastatingly cool?) the concepts and the art are. Yes, I was a math major, but I haven’t cracked a math text in 25 years, and I still think this was an amazingly enlightening read, both for the mathematical beauty and the knowledge that it is possible to combine Art and mathematics in a deep, beautiful way. (Plus, I now have a new favorite phrase: “The Borromean Rings are Hyperbolic: Proof by Quilt”! OMG, I’m in love.)

Figuring Fibers is edited by Carolyn Yackel and Sarah-Marie Belcastro and published by the American Mathematical Society; it is available through Amazon but is (at least for now) available much more cheaply on the American Mathematical Society website. It is the third book in a series; I haven’t yet read Making Mathematics with Needlework or Crafting by Concepts, but you can bet they’re on my reading list now!

October 27, 2018 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

The “art” thing

Some of the responses to my last blog post made me realize I was careless about what I said. There’s a perpetual confusion about what the word “artist” means, because (in my opinion, anyway) there are two meanings to the words “art” and “artist”. The first, which is what I usually mean, is an inclusive one: it refers to someone who is doing something creative, regardless of skill level or degree of external recognition. If you’re making something creative, you’re making art, and you’re an artist.

And then there’s Art with a capital “A,” which is the stuff you see in museums and galleries, possibly accompanied by the Artist, typically someone with a list of exhibits, museum collections, etc. next to their name. What I would describe as “a career artist”.

I would certainly describe myself as an artist, and I have very little doubt that, given time and effort, I could succeed as an Artist. But that’s not where my interests lie. I don’t feel disillusioned about Art, exactly, but after two years as Board President of an Art museum, I feel I have a better idea of what it is and isn’t. Let me explain.

As someone newly interested in things artistic, I wasn’t entirely sure what Art was, or how it differed from the art I saw in day to day life. As a result, I shared the fairly common belief that Art was the best quality art, selected by curators for preservation in museums. And thus, that being an Artist represented achieving the pinnacle of artistic quality, and was something that, as an artist interested in producing good quality work, becoming an Artist was something I should aspire to.

This isn’t an uncommon belief, and there’s a nugget of truth in it: one rarely sees crappy art in museums, because museums exhibit things that people want to see, and people rarely want to see crappy art. But museums don’t necessarily display the best art, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s impossible to determine what art is “best,” because everyone uses different criteria. Second, museums aren’t out to display the best art. They want to display the art that most advances their mission, and which brings in enough visitors to keep them in business. The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, for example, focuses on art in textile media, because that’s our mission. We aren’t going to exhibit paintings, even a Renoir or a Picasso, because that’s not what we’re about. You could create the world’s greatest bronze sculpture, and we would still reject it, because it’s not what we collect or exhibit.

Similarly, art galleries are interested in exhibiting things that will eventually sell enough to keep them in business. Again, they won’t sell crappy art, but they aren’t out to sell the best art, either. So yes, being exhibited in a museum or a gallery is a sign that your work isn’t terrible, but it isn’t a sign that your work is the best, either.

Another trend in modern Art over the last century or so has been the “de-skilling” of Art. Ever since Marcel Duchamp produced his piece “Fountain” in 1917 – a commercially made urinal signed with a fake signature – the trend has been to emphasize concept over technical skill. As a result, a lot of modern Art is about message, not technical skill, and there’s even a certain undercurrent that suggests that a piece that pays too much attention to technical skill isn’t “really” Art. I’ve seen many exhibits by highly skilled Artists, but I’ve also seen a lot of exhibits that, while powerful Art, are technically primitive – as in, I could probably have executed some of the pieces, even though they aren’t in my medium.

Given that I care very much about technical skill in my work, enjoy pushing the edge of what can be done with a technique, and don’t particularly care to put an explicit message into my work, it seems that my work is unlikely to make it significantly into the Art arena any time soon. I might be pleasantly surprised, but I’m also not planning to pound on the door of the Art world demanding recognition. They’re going in one direction and celebrating a particular thing, which is not my thing. Three or four years ago, that would probably have bothered me. Today, it doesn’t. I think two years as Board President at an Art museum has really helped me gain perspective on this. I’m pleased about that, though I’m not sure it’s an insight I’d have sacrificed two years of my creative life for.

(Not that I regret becoming Board President for one moment – but I’m also very happy to have stepped down to Board Vice-President as of a few months ago. Now maybe I can do some weaving again!)

The last week and a half has been spent finishing up the filming for my upcoming class, Color Courage for Weavers. I’m a little nervous that I may be including too much material for one class, but since I plan to offer a online workshop version as well as a content-only version, hopefully those who would like more guidance will be able to get it in the workshop version. It’s now looking like the release date may be early December.