All blog posts | Tien Chiu's Blog

July 20, 2019 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Another jacquard loom is coming!

So, um, I bought another loom. Another TC-2 jacquard loom, in fact.

If you’re a new reader of this blog, you’re probably wondering if I’m nuts. (If you’ve been reading for awhile, you’re not wondering – you already know I’m nuts. Nothing to do with the mental illness, of course. 🙂 ) Why on earth would I feel the need to buy a second TC-2?? Especially now, when I’m so busy building a business??

Well, the short form is that I was thinking of buying a dobby loom with which to weave samples for my online courses, and a used TC-2 came up for sale, incredibly cheap – in fact, at roughly the price of a used dobby loom.

At moments like these, you don’t think (well, not if you’re me!) – you leap bodily for the keyboard and type the words, “I’ll buy your loom!”

Afterwards, you sort out the trivial details, like where on earth you’re going to put the monster (a LOT of garage-rearranging, stuff-purging, etc. is going to have to happen), how you’re going to finance the deal, and whether or not you’ll survive the giant impulse purchase (fortunately, I have a VERY tolerant spouse!).

Fortunately the ad had only been up for an hour or two when I saw it, so I beat out the other interested party, and this lovely creature is now mine, all mine:

new TC-2 jacquard loom — new-to-me TC-2!

She’s a 29″ weaving-width TC-2 jacquard loom with 880 heddles, and she’s in New Mexico right now. So my latest project is working out how to ship an 800-pound loom packed with delicate electronics 1000 miles. If you know of a shipper that handles large, delicate items and will take an item from Albequerque, New Mexico to the San Francisco Bay Area, please leave a comment on this post with your suggestion! I’d really appreciate it.

The next question, of course, is what to name the new TC-2. Fortunately, that is easy…I had already decided that my next loom (if I got one) would be named Maryam, after Maryam Mirzakhani, a brilliant mathematician and the first female recipient of the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics (it’s the “Nobel Prize” of mathematics). Tragically, she died of breast cancer in 2017, at the age of 40 – she did so much, in so little time, that it would have been wonderful to see her contributions for another 50 years!

So Maryam she will be. I can’t wait for her to get here – probably in mid-August, as it will take time to sort out shipping and clear out space in the garage.

Speaking of clearing out space – if you are interested in purchasing an 8-shaft Baby Wolf in the San Francisco Bay Area, leave a comment (that will give me your email address). I will, alas, need to part with Lady Ada sometime in the next 6 weeks to make room for the new TC-2…so I will be selling her. She comes with a castle and stroller, and weaves beautifully. She is not a fine-furniture loom, which is to say she has plenty of scratches and one leg doesn’t match the rest because it had to be replaced – but she will be priced accordingly (once I have a chance to assess fair pricing). So if you are looking for a workhorse loom, suitable for workshops, that isn’t fine furniture, drop me a line.

Now, of course, I can’t help wondering – will Grace and Maryam have babies together, and if so, will they look like this 3D-printed, DIY jacquard loom?

What an adventure! I can’t wait for my lovely Maryam to arrive.

July 6, 2019 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

The best birthday gifts ever!!

My birthday was last week, and I got the TWO best birthday gifts ever! The first was from Ricki, who finished threading Amazing Grace!! Yes, that’s right – finished threading all 2,640 heddles. Ricki has been working on this roughly since December, coming down two or three times a month and working five-hour shifts to get Grace threaded. I am amazingly indebted to Ricki for getting this done, because I simply couldn’t face the giant hump of threading and heaven only knows how long Grace would have sat there had Ricki not appeared.

I have now dived into sleying (much easier) with glee:

Sleying Amazing Grace, my TC-2 jacquard loom — Grace, three-quarters sleyed

Sleying the last half is going slowly because we accidentally put an extra round on warping mill when winding half of the warp, so I have to pull an extra three yards of warp through on four of the six threads going through each dent of the reed. So it’s taking awhile, but I should be done in the next day or two. Debugging is going to be long and painful as well – jacquard looms don’t like to sit unused and Grace has been idle for almost two years – but I’ll launch into it with something like my usual verve. Ricki got me unstuck, for which I owe them, big-time. I’ve already told them they are welcome to come down and weave on Grace any time they want to.

The other best birthday gift ever is from my in-laws (surely the best in-laws ever!). It’s a Leatherman Tread, a 29-in-1 tool bracelet. Yes, you too can break glass, open bottles, drive Philips, hex (Imperial and metric!), and flat-head screws, turn bolts, cut thread and fishing line, open and close oxygen tanks, drive socket wrenches, pop out SIM cards, and, uh, other stuff with one handy, wear-everywhere, TSA-safe bracelet:

The only downside is that I had to remove one full 1″ link and the 1/2″ link to get it to fit properly on my wrist, so I don’t get to use the full set of tools. But Geek Girl is thrilled beyond compare. I’ll never be using a butter knife to turn the bolts on my Baby Wolf again!! And the Tread is even engraved with my name and everything.

Best. Birthday gifts. Ever.

June 25, 2019 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Garlic, garlic, garlic!

I had terrible trouble with garlic rust this year, so I harvested about half my garlic early, and the rest when I got home from ANWG. Because of the rust, and because I planted my garlic a bit too close together, I wound up with only a little bit of it. By Tien standards.

I wound up with 196 bulbs, not counting the 20-30 itty bitty ones, which were about the size of the small, cardboard-tasting heads of garlic you buy in the grocery stores. (Not that I am biased or anything 🙂 .) I grew twenty varieties of garlic. If you look at the first picture, you can totally abandon any idea that all kinds of garlic are alike!

I’m particularly enchanted by Godfather’s Italian, which has huge purple cloves and large bulbs. Here’s a crop of the first photo showing just the Godfather:

Godfather's Italian garlic — Godfather’s Italian garlic variety

I got it from Filaree Farm, which is an organic seed farm specializing in garlic. They sell over 100 varieties! And here I am growing only twenty. The soul of restraint.

I haven’t yet tasted any of the garlic. Garlic-tasting is a bit of a conundrum. I attempted a side-by-side garlic tasting with a friend earlier this year, and discovered that when you try tasting lots of garlics at once, your taste buds overload within a few cloves. (No real surprise there – garlic is notorious for its pungency and persistence!) So I will just have to try them one by one. Starting with the Godfather’s Italian, of course! I will have to see if it tastes as delightful as it looks. And I can’t wait to try Georgian Fire – reputedly the most fiery garlic there is, when eaten raw. Pesto here I come!

Other garden produce is barreling in. The mulberries and a few cherries are done, and the last of the apriums (apricot-plum cross) are on the kitchen counter, but the peaches are getting started, and the Santa Rosa plums are in full swing. Tomatoes are just starting to ripen – I plucked the first Sungolds off the vine two days ago, which means the deluge should come down in a few weeks. And the horseradish is up, the raspberries are raspberrying, and I’m way behind on picking the blueberries! Summer is here in all its hyper-productive bounty.

And now I’m off again! I need to tie up the raspberries, weed the irises, and cross-pollinate more killer mutant ninja tomatoes. A mad-scientist world-dominating tomato breeder’s work is never done…

June 22, 2019 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

ANWG report!

I’m back from ANWG, where my classes went super well! I had seven students in my color workshop, and a full house in both painted warp seminars (40 students total). There was a lot of enthusiasm for the online course I’m developing on painted warps, and the color mixing tool was a real hit as well. And it was wonderful getting to see lots of old friends, and meet new ones!

I particularly enjoyed wandering the exhibit halls, where there were many inspiring pieces. I was particularly taken by the grand prize winner, a jacket titled “What Rubbish” by Marlene Randall. It was a handwoven jacket woven from strips of denim jeans, lined with an indigo-dyed recycled sheet, and embellished beautifully with sashiko and an embroidered yellow flower. It was well-cut and exquisitely sewn – beautiful!

Marlene generously gave me permission to post a photo of “What Rubbish,” so here it is:

"What Rubbish," by Marlene Randall. Winner, Best in Show at ANWG 2019. — “What Rubbish,” by Marlene Randall. Winner, Best in Show at ANWG 2019.

Another piece I found inspiring was titled “Rainbow Gathering,” by Kathleen O’Hern. This piece was a set of interwoven copper wires in a distorted grid pattern (lots of curvy bits!), with brightly colored, rainbow-y “squares” woven tapestry-style in the grid, in checkerboard fashion. Only, because the grid wasn’t square, neither were the squares. I loved the dynamic feel of the piece, and the way the colors spanned the rainbow without being in “marching rainbow order”. A very nice use of color!

And I bought four gorgeous blue-and-green tea towels from Laura Fry, because they’re gorgeous and I needed towels for the gym. Yes, I know, sacrilegious, but I go to the gym almost every day, and I like having beautiful gym towels! Pix soon, I promise!

But the most surprising thing about ANWG is that I came home with a tiara!

I was awarded the tiara by fellow teacher Mary Lessman, who gives tiaras to people who have “changed her life forever – for the better, of course.” She says she never tells them how they have changed her life, just that they have. What an honor! Thank you, Mary.

I joined the Tiara Tribe (there are currently 26 members) that evening, in a special ceremony attended by six other members of the Tribe (and a bottle of whiskey!):

Mary did share with me half the reason (not the whole reason) I was getting the tiara. She told me that her sister has been struggling with bipolar disorder, reads my blog, and had found my writings on bipolar disorder very helpful to her. I’m really glad to hear that.

A note to Mary’s sister, if you are reading this: Thank you for letting Mary tell me that. Because, while I write my blog for the world, I wrote my essays on bipolar disorder especially for you, and other people with bipolar disorder/mental illness. Thank you for letting me know I made a difference. That makes a big difference to me. It’s why I write.

Anyway, I came home from ANWG feeling refreshed and inspired. I spent almost two hours in the exhibit halls, absorbing the creative spirit, and came home feeling an urge to do new work again, for the first time in almost three years. And I think the business is finally at the point where I might be able to start taking weekends off again and do that new work.

I’ve been working more or less nonstop for the last three years, learning how to build online courses, set up a website, do email marketing, teaching online courses, and incidentally setting up and building a business. It hasn’t been drudgery by any means – I’ve been working seven days a week on it partly because it’s been a fascinating and totally engrossing project – but I don’t think it’s healthy to have been so obsessed, either, so now that I have a glimmer of inspiration, I’m going to try to hang onto it this time.

So I’m going to start sketching out this new project. I need to manage it on two fronts. The first is sketching out the creative side of the project, which is still pretty unformed. It has a similar theme to the Tangram woman book project I did in 2010:

But I want to express the progression from very locked-down, logical, not-creative to more creative, free, open in jacquard-woven imagery. The idea is to go from flat, black and white imagery (no pile) in the bottom left, to brightly colored, luscious pile velvet in the top right. I think that will make for a really interesting piece!

But that also means weaving velvet. Ricki (my studio helper) is almost done threading the TC-2 (for which they should be awarded a medal!), but I still need to put together the tools – in particular, a velvet cantra and bobbins to fit it. It will be easier if I can do the 3D printing design myself, so yesterday night I installed FusionSoft 360 on my computer and I’m going to start learning how to design things for 3D printing today. Say a prayer for me – CAD programs are supposed to be difficult to learn to begin with, and on top of that, I’m terrible at 3D visualization, so I expect this to be a pretty steep learning curve.

June 11, 2019 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Off to ANWG!

I know it’s been awhile, but I’ve been heads-down working on my seminar and workshop courses for ANWG. I’m pleased to say that they’re now complete, and both are going to be fantastic. (Yes, I’m well out of the “worst-ever” phase!)

The workshop course covers color and color mixing in weaving, and the painted warp seminar is an overview of designing with color in painted warps. Both come with handouts summarizing the content, so students don’t have to frantically take notes the entire time.

Both courses embody my “art science” mission, which is summarized on this slide:

slide text: "I believe color makes sense. It can be analyzed, understood, and explained in simple, rational terms. If you learn how color works, you can design with color!"

I’m particularly proud of my painted-warp presentation. I wove nearly 100 samples while researching painted warps, and while I have by no means exhausted the potential of the topic, I now know quite a bit on the topic. Plus, I have a lot of great eye candy!

I’m planning to develop the presentation into a full online course later this year. Here are a few teaser slides.

This one shows the effect of light wefts vs. dark wefts (click to see the larger version – if reading by email, you may have to go to the blog post on my website – sorry!)

painted warps with white, gray, and black wefts — Light vs. dark weft

The brain tends to react to light patches as if they were brightly lit areas, and to dark areas as if they were poorly lit areas. Since, in our evolutionary history, things have been lit from the top (i.e. by the sun), the brain assumes light areas are on top, dark areas on the bottom.

So if you use a light-colored weft, weft-dominant areas will appear to be on top, forcing the warp-dominant areas into the background. If you use a darker weft, it will sink to the bottom, pushing the warp-dominant areas to the top.

The brain is more interested in things on the top (accessible) than things on the bottom (likely inaccessible), so it pays more attention to the stuff on the top.

The practical upshot of which is, if you use a lighter weft, the eye will look at the weft and not the warp.

This slide is a little less intellectually complicated, but makes great eye candy:

It shows the effect of a progressively more warp-dominant draft. Here I’ve taken a warp painted in the same set of colors, and woven three samples in the same threading and treadling, but changing the tie-up to be progressively more warp-dominant to show how changing the proportions of warp vs. weft changes the appearance.

(If you are interested in learning more about what I teach, or want to read some of my free articles about color in weaving, hop on over to my teaching site, warpandweave.com!)

Meanwhile, in total world domination-land (what am I doing wasting time on weaving, anyway, when there are worlds to conquer??), I am almost done with my first round of cross-pollinations – which is to say, I have done two cross-pollinations with almost every plant in my spreadsheet of desired cross-pollinations. Next up is to do the second-tier crosses, the ones that sound interesting but which I’m less sure I want to pursue. Also to check and see which cross-pollinations didn’t “take,” and redo them.

Some of the cross-pollinations, though, clearly did “take”. Like this one:

photo of baby killer mutant ninja tomato — baby killer mutant ninja tomato!

This one is a cross between plant 280 (which provided the pollen) and plant 295 (the “female” plant, which is bearing the fruit). I use plant numbers to prevent the FBI, the Justice League, and the Avengers from figuring out what I’m really up to and foiling my evil plans. Just kidding! It’s much easier and quicker, and results in smaller labels than trying to write up the entire variety description on a label going onto a tiny flower. (At least, that’s my cover story!)

Looking it up in my spreadsheet, 280 is a 5th-generation plant from a cross that was fuzzy with red and yellow striped fruit. All I know (so far) is that it’s fuzzy and has striped fruit when green. If it turns out that I don’t like the plant for some reason – maybe the fruit taste bad, or they turn out to be an ugly chocolate brown or something – no harm! I just won’t save and plant the seed. But if I do like it…I have a cross between it and Fuzzy Mix to turn loose upon the world. (Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!)

Meanwhile, I have harvested nearly all of my garlic. I had terrible trouble with garlic rust this year, so I harvested early. I don’t have photos of the crop yet, but the bulbs are almost cured, so after I return from ANWG I will take photos of the crop. Despite the rust, I have a ton of garlic (that’s what happens when you plant 20+ varieties), so no worries about shortages this year! I had dreams of a grand garlic taste-off, but an early experiment with a friend led to the conclusion that after tasting four kinds of garlic, the only thing you can taste – even after rinsing your mouth and eating all the bread, parsley, and other palate cleansers you possibly can – is garlic, even if you don’t eat any more garlic for the rest of the day! So there is simply no way to taste 20 kinds of garlic at once. Ah well. I suppose I’ll simply have to enjoy them one by one. Photos once I have cured and trimmed all the bulbs.

Off to ANWG! My flight leaves in a few hours.