Tien Chiu

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June 29, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Happy 50th to me!

Today’s my 50th birthday! Happy half-century to me.

I had hoped to spend this day somewhat differently, but the pandemic got in the way. A party with all my friends, perhaps, to celebrate two important milestones: First, a half-century of life, a milestone that I had never expected to reach, because I grew up with bipolar disorder, spent about a third of my teens and twenties battling suicidal depression, and never really expected to reach thirty. And yet, here I am at fifty, still kicking, and (with medication) in great mental health. Miracles do happen. (As they say: It gets better.)

Second, with the launch of my last class, I feel I’ve successfully transitioned to making a living as a weaving teacher. Which is to say, the classes I’ve been offering have finally been popular enough, and sold well enough, consistently enough, that I’m reasonably confident I can make a living teaching weaving. It’s not just a fluke; I won’t get rich, but I’ll be able to pay my bills doing this.

So, two HUGE milestones for me today.

In lieu of a party, however, I’m celebrating the next best way: Taking a day off from the teaching business (which I haven’t done in heaven knows how long), puttering around the house, and doing only fun, “me” stuff. It’s been ages since I’ve had this much free time, and I’m loving it!

I’ve started by making myself a birthday cake. Lemon cheesecake, from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. Cheesecake is one of my favorite desserts ever, and this is my favorite cheesecake, hands down. She observes that cheesecake is basically a custard (it’s thickened with eggs), so by baking it in a water bath, as one does with custard, you can get a cheesecake that is wonderfully creamy from edge to edge, without that dried-out, caky edge that is unfortunately all too common. Swoon. It’s in the oven right now. Of course it will have to cool and then be chilled for several hours before it’s ready to eat, but hopefully by bedtime I’ll be able to have a slice.

I’ve also finished reading a fabulous soon-to-be-released book by Virginia Postrel. It’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, available for pre-order from Amazon. I got my hands on a review copy from Virginia, and I have to tell you, it’s one of the most fascinating and compelling books I’ve ever read on the history of textiles. If you thought Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years was interesting, you’re gonna swoon over this one. I think it’s actually even more interesting than Barber’s book. Run out and preorder your copy now. (I’ll write a more detailed review later, once it gets a bit closer to release.)

I’m currently in the midst of reading another fantastic book that I’ve been awaiting impatiently for months:

That’s right – Wendy Landry’s long-awaited book on weaving velvet is finally available!! I had asked Jamie to preorder it for me from Amazon, and (with amazing timing) it showed up just in time for my birthday. I’ve been eagerly devouring it. It’s re-sparked my interest in velvet-weaving. I still have no idea how I’d get space behind my loom for the velvet cantra, but perhaps someday….I love the design possibilities of velvet and really want to try weaving it!

Meanwhile, just in case you didn’t have enough home-grown fruit, I had just enough Santa Rosa plums last week for a plum pie:

A bit tart, but delicious, especially with vanilla ice cream!

Finally, Fritz would like you to know that he takes his job as Studio Inspector very seriously. He hasn’t yet decided whether he approves of this new swift. (But I’m using it anyway.)

Off to celebrate some more!

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings

March 31, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Making love visible

Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility, and I’m glad to tell you – finally! – that I am the proud wife of a trans woman.

No, I haven’t changed partners. Jamie and I are every bit as happy as we’ve been since our first date in 2006, and we’re looking forward to celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary (gad, has it been that long??) this June. It’s simply that she has finally realized and is living as her real gender, and she’s changed her name to reflect her new identity.

And, may I say, she is now a lot happier. From a spouse’s perspective, it has been like watching a rose go from a tightly wrapped bud into a full, beautiful bloom. I’m thrilled, and excited for her.

Meet the new Jamie:

Jamie, my wife

Jamie’s actually been “out” to family and friends for a bit over a year now, but didn’t feel comfortable coming out to the general public until fairly recently. So we picked today as the best day to make ourselves visible.

Please welcome Jamie, y’all.

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings

November 19, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Paying your (creative) self first

It’s been a long dry spell for my creative projects. Years, in fact. I’ve been so busy working on my teaching business that I simply haven’t had the time or energy to do anything else.

However, I’ve finally finished creating a class that I think I can be proud of, and I’ve reached the point where I have a little breathing room. But, I still felt like I had no ideas, no inspiration for creative work.

After thinking about this for a little while, I realized it was because I was getting up every morning, spending four hours working on business stuff, and then, in my “spare time,” trying to do creative work. But it doesn’t work that way. At least, not for me.

My prime creative hours are in the morning, as soon as I get up. By spending four hours working on business stuff, I was essentially spending everything on the business and then trying to give the remaining crumbs to my creative work.

This is like the common fallacy that people commit while trying to save for retirement: save whatever money’s left over at the end of the month. Every financial planner ever born will tell you not to do that, because there will never be anything left over. Instead, if you want to save, pay yourself first. Put your money into savings at the beginning of the month, and make your finances work with whatever’s left over after that. You’ll find a way.

So that’s what I’m going to start doing: Pay my creative self first. I’m going to spend two hours every morning doing creative work before starting in on business work for the day. Whatever business work needs to get done will have to fit in around that.

Welcome back, creative self. It’s been a long time.

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings

November 18, 2019 by Tien Chiu

The Myth of One Idea, and the Peril of the Perfect Choice

One of my students told me recently that her biggest challenge was picking just one idea out of the many buzzing through her head, and asked, “How do you narrow your ideas down to just one?”

This was a really interesting question, so I thought I’d edit down my answer and turn it into an essay. So here it is.

There’s a Zen concept called “mu,” which can be translated roughly as “unask the question”. It means that the question is framed incorrectly, often with an assumption that makes it impossible to answer. (“Have you stopped beating your wife?” is the sort of question that might elicit “mu”.)

So….the answer to your question is mu. Sort of.

I think that the idea of winnowing ideas down to a single idea that you commit to doing is a bad approach, philosophically speaking, both because it isn’t how creative flow works, and because it creates an artificial sense of scarcity that can shut down your creative brain. (More on that in a bit.) Good creative work isn’t a single-project affair. Creative work is a series of explorations that evolve into something interesting over time. Hence, you can’t pick just one idea to work on, because there isn’t a single idea to be picked. It’s more like a river of ideas, with some flowing in and some flowing out as each project evolves into completion.

When I make something, I pick an idea for what I’m making – generally, it turns out not to be a great one, but you have to start somewhere. Then I start working on it. Something about it turns out not to be quite right, so I change my train of thought a bit. That brings another idea to mind, which I add to the work….Things evolve as the project progresses. As a result, I don’t get attached to any specific idea, because I know that all of them are interesting, and all of them are flawed. An idea is merely a starting-point.

If I can’t decide between two starting ideas, it means that both of them will be equally good choices, so it doesn’t matter which one I choose. Whichever one I don’t pick will still be there if I later decide to pursue it. I park it in an “idea notebook,” where I can revisit it later if I want to.

I do work on only one project at a time, because I can only physically weave one thing at a time on the loom. However, I tend to work in series rather than work on a single piece, so I will put a 10-yard warp on the loom, and work on a series of pieces on that warp. So I’ll put on a warp with one particular threading. That commits me to using a specific set of warp yarns, in a particular threading. But then I can use different wefts, different tie-up, different treadlings – exploring many ideas in a series of evolving projects.

Creativity is an evolution, not a single idea and its execution. In my creative practice, at least, the One Idea is a myth.


Closely related to the Myth of the One Idea is the Peril of the Perfect Choice. The Peril of the Perfect Choice says that since you can only have one idea, it needs to be the BEST idea, so you need to make the Perfect Choice. It’s therefore important to line up all the possibilities, put together a spreadsheet, exhaustively compare their pros and cons, and eventually reach a conclusion. This can take hours, days, weeks, and is mentally and emotionally exhausting – and, in most cases, any of the options would have been perfectly fine.

I think we’ve all had this experience.

My personal breaking-point was the day I spent half an hour standing in front of a display of batteries at the supermarket, trying to decide whether the ones designed for electronics would be worth the extra thirty cents compared to the “regular” brand-name ones versus the generic ones which were even cheaper, but could I depend on them not to leak and not to burn the house down, and what about rechargeable batteries? The correct answer would have been to grab ANY GODDAMN PACK OF BATTERIES FROM THE DAMN DISPLAY and get into line, because any pack of batteries the right size would have been perfectly fine for my needs. Instead, I wasted half an hour looking for the perfect battery. This, says the Buddha, is suffering.

Ever since then I’ve tried to do what’s described as “satisficing” – pick the first thing that satisfies the need, rather than trying to pick the perfect thing. So I compare options, but only until I find one that is satisfactory, and then I grab it and move on with my day. I don’t keep looking for all the possibilities. It’s surprisingly difficult to do the first time, but once you get in the habit it gets easier to maintain the discipline, and it saves a lot of time and brainpower.

(Unless it’s chocolate. In which case, Heaven help me, I must taste every possible combination of chocolate with every flavor that might be interesting. But purely for scientific purposes, you understand. 😉 )

In the specific case of ideas, it’s also useful to recognize when you are opening and when you are closing. When you are brainstorming new ideas, you’re opening. So welcome new ideas. The more, the merrier. Good ideas, bad ideas, doesn’t matter – collect them all! You want as many as possible because you don’t get to the good ideas without getting a whole bunch of bad ideas, too. Kinda like diamonds – to get diamonds you have to start with a ton of gravel.

But when you are in the closing phase, trying to winnow out ideas – that’s the point where you have to ruthlessly discard and satisfice. At that point I find that it REALLY helps to have an idea notebook or a “parking lot” for ideas. That way, when you decide not to pursue an idea, you don’t have to say goodbye to it forever, cast it out of the house with that harsh ring of finality. Instead, you can gently pat it on the head and say, “Not now, maybe later,” then stash it in the idea notebook, tucked safely away for later perusal. It makes letting go a lot easier.

The point in all of this is that there are two assumptions that every creative person should beware of. First, the idea that they need to focus on just one thing at a time. That can really kill the creative flow of ideas, and it can rapidly lead to the second pitfall: The assumption that because you can do only one thing, it needs to be the BEST thing. By creating artificial scarcity (ONE idea), you tell your subconscious to ball up, prepare for hardship, and make sure its decision is absolutely correct, because it’s critical that it get this decision RIGHT, by gum! This leads to perfectionism, which leads to decisionmaking paralysis, which leads to the death of creativity.

The answer? Let go. Let things be messy. Explore ideas in series, let some things peter out into the middle of nowhere, let others take bold leaps. Some will succeed. Some won’t. Don’t be afraid to waste some time or effort or materials doing something that isn’t perfect or isn’t fully optimal. Satisfice. Have fun. Have at it.

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings

September 22, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Cat-iversary #6!

Yes, it’s now been six turns around the wheel with these adorable kittens:

Fritz and Tigress on adoption day, 9/22/2013

They are now middle-aged kitties, with occasional middle-aged-kitty health issues: Fritz went to the vet earlier this year with a urinary tract blockage, and Tigress needed anesthesia for a periodontal deep-cleaning, though fortunately she didn’t need any teeth removed. We are not looking forward to brushing her teeth for her!

(Fritz’s teeth were just fine – apparently his fetish for chewing on cardboard and packing tape is good for something!)

The cats, however, are still eager studio assistants. Here’s Tigress assisting with a studio shoot, by guarding my samples from would-be sample molesters (i.e., me!):

Tigress guarding my samples

Of course, every photo looks better with a cat photobombing it, especially if the cat is wrinkling the silly little bits of fabric and getting cat hair all over them! But somehow humans never seem to understand that. Go figure.

Also, sometimes humans get their priorities wrong and need to be reminded of who’s in charge. Here Fritz is laying down the law in the middle of a photo shoot (yes, he did get his belly rub!):

The cats, of course, continue to excel at cat things. Here’s Fritz, practicing the ancient art of Taking Up Enormous Expanses of Bed:

Big Fritz is Big!

And here’s Tigress, mere moments before the human decided that perhaps all that yarn needed to be relocated:

Curious Cat is Curious!

Lest you think this mere paranoia, this had happened to an innocent skein of yarn earlier in the week:

So yeah, it’s a good thing that our little furry fiend…

….is also infinitely adorable:

Here’s to six wonderful years, and hopefully many more to come!

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings Tagged With: cats

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