Tien Chiu

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Rites of passage

Not quite six years ago, I decided to walk away from my old life.

I realized that my twenty-year career managing software projects, while lucrative, was not fulfilling. Actually, let me be blunt: it was crushing my soul.

I was fortunate enough to have enough money to make a career transition, and to take some time to decide what to do next.

Of course, figuring out what to do next wasn’t going to be easy. As I wrote in my blog post “Chrysalis”, announcing my decision,

What to do next? That’s more complicated. I’d love to work in the craft arena, because that’s where my heart is. However, creative pursuits, particularly craftwork, are notoriously underpaid. And the San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live. That means I need to earn enough to pay my share of a Silicon Valley mortgage, since we have no intentions of moving. That makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to make my entire living from working in craft or craft publishing.

Well. You know what happened next. After six years of working my ass off, working harder than I’d ever done before in my life, I’ve arrived at a point where I can, in fact, pay my half of the mortgage, working as a weaving teacher. This is what I had dreamed I might be able to do, but not expected – how could anyone possibly expect that? – and, well, here I am.

And now Janet Dawson and I are on our way to fulfilling another of my dreams – founding an online weaving academy, where weavers who want to learn how to weave better, and to design their own work, can do just that, in a supportive community of teachers and weavers. I won’t go deep into our plans, but let’s just say that this is what I desperately wanted when I was a beginning weaver, and we are carefully designing and planning a school that we think will be a huge benefit for the weaving community, in addition to being a decades-long career for both of us.

At this point I feel like I have finally made the transition from software project manager to full-time weaving teacher/entrepreneur. The door is finally closed on the previous chapter of my life, and I’m starting a new one.

So it’s time for a rite of passage.

This one’s a curious one. I had never really thought about the prospect until a few months ago – it was always “something for other people”.

Then, sometime in June, I thought, “It’s time. I want a tattoo. A phoenix, rising from its ashes.”

The phoenix, of course, has been my unofficial personal symbol for quite some time. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to reinvent myself, either because of the bipolar disorder or because of some other disaster or sea change in my life. But after weaving a phoenix for my mother’s passing, and rebirthing myself out of the ashes of a previous career, I feel like it’s something that connects me to my personal power, and to the spirit of powerful change. There’s a lot of that going on in my life right now, so I want something permanent to mark that passage.

It’s not that different from the scarification that used to happen with manhood rites, except that in this case it’s something I’m doing for personal, not tribal, significance.

I’m going to put it on my right upper arm – I’m right-handed, so that’s a place that feels powerful to me, and it’s also a good place to put a tattoo to keep it protected from sun and chafing, which will help keep it from fading. I can also decide whether I want to show it or not.

The artist I’ve chosen to have do the tattoo is Tadi, a Korean artist who’ll be visiting San Francisco as a guest artist for three months. Here are two examples of his work on Instagram, which will give you an idea of his style:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CRL1bQBLiF7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUNRO8xJqF0/

And the inspirational photo I sent him, which is about the size and pose that I’m thinking of, is this one:

Tadi will be drawing a custom design for me, of course, and we’ll be finalizing the details a day or two before my tattoo appointment. That’s November 30 – a week and a bit after I finish teaching Gorgeous Gradients.

Frequently Asked Questions

Aren’t you worried you might regret this later?

Kiddo, there ain’t much I’ve done in the last six years that I might NOT have had serious reason to regret. Starting with walking away from a job that paid comfortably into six figures for a VERY uncertain and unproven financial life as a weaving teacher. Also, deciding to stay married when my wife came out as transgender three years ago, despite being a heterosexual woman who thought she’d married a man. Also, deciding to change from the solo weaving career to starting a weaving academy. Also, see my entire past history.

I’m not an irrational risk-taker, but the whole point of this tattoo is to celebrate the culmination of a high-risk move that, with a ton of very hard, very carefully thought-out work, has proved tremendously rewarding. There are reasons that I might decide against it, but concerns about future regrets aren’t one of them.

But tattoos fade. Aren’t you worried that it’s going to look ugly in 30 years?

Well, first, I’m 51. I’m not interested in winning beauty contests now (though I am tempted to enter powerlifting contests – I’d be third in the state of California for my age group if I did!), and 30 years from now, I’ll be 81 and (I hope) even less vain about my appearance.

Second, I did think things through, and did some research. Of all the tattoo colors, black fades the least. Fine lines, such as Tadi uses, do eventually fade away (we’re talking 15-20 years though), but they can also be retouched by another tattoo artist, so I’m not worried about that. The fine lines will also spread and fuzz out slightly, but since the lines are mostly used to create shading, again, not a big issue. Finally, how much abrasion, sun, wind, etc. the skin gets has a big effect on the longevity of the tattoo. So my choice of the upper arm is great – it’s a well protected area and doesn’t rub against clothing much.

And, if all else fails, black is also the most easily removed color for laser tattoo removal.

Aren’t tattoos just a flash-in-the-pan trendy thing?

According to Ipsos, 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo, so apparently I’m not particularly hip and trendy by getting one. (Sigh.)

What do the cats think of your getting a tattoo?

Hey babe, keep handing over those cat treats and you can do whatever the heck you want with the rest of your time!

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Cat-iversary!

Today is a day of celebration! Huge congratulations to Tigress and Fritz, who exactly eight years ago came home from their first successful hunt. And what a hunt it was! They “bagged” not just one, but TWO humans to adore, worship, and serve them for the rest of their lives.

Here are the mighty hunters the evening they arrived:

Fritz and Tigress as kittens

And here they are a few days ago, snuggled up together:

Fritz and Tigress snuggling
Snuggly cats!

Fritz still loves his belly rubs:

Fritz flopped over demanding a belly rub
Belly rubs are therapeutic!

And Tigress still likes to sleep at the top of shelves. (It’s nice to have friends in high places!)

She’s very Zen, so perhaps she’s engaged in sectarian dialogue with HH the Dalai Lama while she naps?

Tigress sleeping on a shelf above a postcard of the Dalai Lama
Tigress the Zen kitty

As a spiritual master, Tigress would be the first to tell you that if you love something, you must let it go free. If you don’t, how could you chase and kill it again???

Tigress hunting a feather toy
Tigress hunting

Yes, it’s been eight wonderful years. Eight years of being sat on, meowed at, mercilessly ordered to hand out the cat treats, and subjected to arbitrary demands from a tyrannical and utterly marvelous pair of cats. Here’s to many more years of “supervision” from our wonderful cats, Fritz and Tigress!

Fritz and Tigress providing supervision for some quill-winding

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Philosophical musings

Two or three more hours of threading have moved me along to here in the tying-on:

warp with about three inches of yarns tied on
Progress on “Fire” warp

I’ve finished tying on about three inches of the 29″ wide warp, so I’m about 10% done. At 2,640 threads, that means I’ve got 264 threads tied on, or about 45 seconds per thread. That’s awfully slow, but I’m taking my time, pulling each thread through the original cross to make sure I’ve got the right thread before taking another thread. I’m alternating between orange threads and black threads, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve mistakenly grabbed an orange thread when I should have grabbed a black one! I guess I naturally gravitate towards orange. 🙂

Also, I’m in a wrist brace, battling tendinitis in my right arm. It’s getting better since I switched to a left-handed trackball, but it does make tying knots more awkward. So it will likely take me 30+ hours to tie on this warp, and another 5 hours or so to pull through and sley the reed. (I had to take the warp out of the reed while swapping out loom guts.) And then, of course, I’ll have to weave several inches and spend a few hours debugging everything before I can weave anything. Patience, grasshopper!

Then, of course, there is the question of WHAT to weave. And that gets me to the philosophical question.

One of the things I want to do in my work is explore the limits of jacquard weaving. When I see jacquard weaving in exhibits, I see a lot of work that is basically using the loom as a low-resolution printer: creating imagery in cloth, using fairly simple structures. While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with doing that, it barely scratches the surface of what is possible with such a powerful tool. I feel that if I’m going to own a loom that can do virtually anything, I should explore all the “anything” that it can do. (Kind of like owning a Ferrari – if all you’re going to do is commute to work on surface streets, why did you spend all that money on a car that can go from 0 to 60 in two seconds flat?)

Of course this is a logical fallacy. Just because you own a tool doesn’t mean you have to be “owned” by the tool, creatively speaking – even if you have a fancy hammer, everything doesn’t have to be a nail. But beyond the guilt engendered by having an expensive tool that you aren’t using to its full potential, I also feel drawn to explore the intriguing and complex technical spaces opened up by having a jacquard loom.

For example: most woven shibori is done with relatively simple, repeating patterning because of the limitations of shaft looms. What happens when you do more complex patterning? Imagery? Double weave with one layer drawn up and the other left loose? Combine that with imagery in the drawn-up layer? Double weave with different drawn-up patterns in each layer?

Any of these would be difficult to do with a shaft loom, but can be woven with a jacquard loom. (Admittedly, it may involve significant contortions in setting up the design.)

From an artistic standpoint, the question is whether all that technical exploration is really necessary to art. And, of course, it isn’t. Art is about what you are saying, not how you got there. Which is probably why most art exhibits feature the low-resolution printer type of jacquard weaving. The artist was focusing on message, not exploring technique. Which is fine, if your purpose is art.

I’m not so convinced that my purpose is art. As I said on my recent Textiles and Tea interview with the Handweavers Guild of America, I think of myself as a researcher. I seek to explore, to learn things, then I publish and teach what I’ve learned. The art is important to me, but it’s more a part of the exploration and research than an end in itself. And that’s just fine.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this realization, but I’m good with it.

I’m still deciding what to explore with the Fire warp. Fortunately, with 35 hours of physical work to go before I can weave anything, I’ve got plenty of time to think about it. I’ve also got parts arriving late this week for Grace, which will enable me to put on the Color Gradients sample warp. So I’ve got plenty of time to decide what I want to explore.

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Decluttering

The last several days have been a frenzy of nesting activity. Three days ago (Thursday) I found a gardening service to tame the overgrowth in the much-neglected back yard. They took out the fabric pots, hacked out the weeds, and left me with a clean slate:

Our back yard, after the gardening service cleared out the weeds

It’s barer than it was in the past; our passion fruit vine died for no apparent reason earlier this year (we’re still discussing where to replant a replacement), and we took out the four peach trees because we weren’t happy with the flavor of the peaches. We’re still discussing what and whether to replant in their place. There will be more greenery come summer, though. The persimmon trees and the grape vines simply haven’t leafed out yet.

At any rate, the wild undergrowth and the weeds are gone. The lemon tree has some flowers, though, so the hummingbirds and honey bees are hovering and zipping happily about. I have started a few tomato plants (“few,” in Tien terms, meaning about fifteen to twenty – that is very restrained for a Tien!) but I think I will otherwise let the garden lie fallow this year. I have been hard-pressed to keep up with the garden over the last few years, and lately it’s been coming down to a choice between gardening and other creative pursuits. Last year I did almost no weaving or (personal) blogging. This year I’m trying to declutter my life to open some space for the creative work I value, and have done way too little of in the last few years.

Decluttering has been the big theme for the last three days, in fact. Friday I went through all the kitchen cabinets and got rid of the accumulated detritus of the last few years. There is something wonderfully freeing about finally discarding that half-empty bottle of rice vinegar that your wife brought as dowry when she shacked up with you fifteen years ago and which has not been used since. Plus, what on earth were we doing with four containers of baking powder, three jars of molasses, two bottles of liquid smoke, and a partridge in the kitchen cupboards?? (I’ve never even contemplated planting a pear tree!!)

Saturday I continued my purge, rolling into the dining room, which was suffering badly from “Well, we’re not sure where to put it, so let’s put it in the dining room” syndrome. A ton of junk went into the trash, more got given away.

Jamie also helped me put together my new dye table. My dye studio is my back patio – since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the weather is pretty warm year-round, it never freezes, and it rains only in the winter, infrequently, this works pretty well. But I had been dyeing on a ratty old wooden table with some six-foot boards laid across it, which was a pain to work with. One of the goals of the backyard cleanup was to get rid of the ratty old table and replace it with a stainless steel restaurant food prep table that I could use for dyeing.

Which we did. I don’t have pictures of it just yet because we didn’t quite finish it today – we got it assembled and stood upright, but I haven’t yet removed the protective plastic wrapper or set it up with the plastic bins that I’ll be using it with. But it’s gorgeous – a 30″ wide, 72″ long stainless steel table with two stainless steel shelves underneath. The bottom one is the perfect height to store two 5-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, or larger stacks of 2-gallon or smaller buckets. The top one is great for smaller boxes holding spoons, syringes, scales, mixing cups, etc. for dyeing. I can’t wait to use it!

Tomorrow’s plan is to finish reorganizing the kitchen and dining room and scrub down everything for the dye “studio”. And then – dive in and actually use the new dye table to dye the next warps for Grace and Maryam! So looking forward to the inaugural dye job.

Stay tuned! (Lots of pictures tomorrow, I promise!)

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Hello again! It’s been awhile!

It’s been almost six months since my last post. I’d say I’ve been in the midst of a tug-o-war between my professional and artistic life, but in fact there really hasn’t been a contest. What irony: I quit my job to pursue a career in weaving, and the immediate result is that I’ve done practically no weaving of my own for the last five years. Everything I’ve done for the last five years, all day, six days out of seven, has been focused either on developing, teaching, or marketing classes about color in weaving, and the seventh day has basically been spent doing laundry and spending time with Jamie.

That sounds kinda grim, but it’s not! I’m loving what I’m doing. This is so much better than working at Google, even though I’m getting paid a lot less, have no job security, and the usual litany of self-employment woes. I love doing research, I love teaching, and I love all the amazing new things I’m learning every day. Not just about weaving, but about running a business, marketing, customer service, hiring and working with contractors, bookkeeping, advertising….the list goes on and on. Every day it’s something new, and I get to pick what I want to work on.

And while it’s still a bit overwhelming, the workload is starting to get less all-consuming. In the beginning I was working 60+ hour weeks for months at a time; now, the load is less, maybe 50-55 hours a week. And this week and next, I’m taking my first absolutely, positively, not-working vacation in nearly five years. It has taken a LOT of work to get to the point where I feel comfortable doing that, but I’m feeling really good about it.

Where does the teaching business stand?

I had (not a typo!) eleven thousand enrollments in my classes last year. I taught a total of four classes (two with Janet Dawson), plus one free prerecorded class, and some people took multiple classes, so I actually taught eight thousand weavers.

Think about that for a moment. Eight thousand weavers.

If I were teaching the traditional way, in physical classes, to groups of five to twenty weavers, I’d have had to teach at least four hundred classes to reach eight thousand weavers. A hundred and fifty more to teach all eleven thousand who enrolled. If I’d taught a packed-to-the-gills three-day workshop every single weekend of the year, it would have taken me eleven years to teach all those classes.

But the beauty of online classes is that – if you design your classes the right way – you can teach a lot of students without compromising the quality of the class. In fact, the classes can actually be better quality with larger groups, because more students lead to livelier discussion groups and more people sharing photos of what they’re working on = more inspiration for other students. It isn’t easy and you have to study how to design classes specifically for online learning, but I believe that – for topics such as mine – a good online class can be greatly superior to the traditional 3-day workshop.

(My students seem to like my classes, anyway; in the post-class survey for Make Your Colors Sing, my “big” class on color in weaving, 86% of the students rated it 9 or 10 out of 10 YES!! when asked if they’d recommend it to other weavers. This makes me very, very happy; I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the class, and I’m glad to know it paid off.)

The other thing that is wonderful to me about the numbers I just quoted is that I taught the vast majority of those students for free. Janet Dawson and I taught the Stash-Busting Scarf Weave-Along (3,000+ students) over three weeks, then pitched students on our longer course Stash Weaving Success. After Stash Weaving Success, we taught the free Discover Color Weave-Along (5,000 students), after which I pitched Make Your Colors Sing.

The Weave-Alongs were intended as “tasters” to give people an idea of what our classes were like, but they were also meant to be stand-alone, free classes that delivered serious value. Many people actually paid $20-25 after the classes to retain lifetime access to course materials because they found them so valuable. Janet and I not only gave away quite a few video and text lessons, we did a month of live lectures and Q&A sessions, and spent considerable time answering questions in the class discussion groups. It was a full-on class and we took it very seriously as a class, even though we weren’t getting paid for it. If I’d enrolled in it, I’d have expected to pay at least $40-50 for it. And we gave it away for free.

It did pay off for us, in that quite a few people signed up for the follow-on class. But I’ve had quite a few people tell me that I should charge for subsequent weave-alongs, because I’m giving away far too much value for free.

I’m not totally ignoring that advice, but I’m not leaping for it either. Because I think one of the most beautiful things about teaching online is that it creates a business model where I can teach eight thousand people a substantial, month-long class about color entirely for free and still make a good living. My parents were scientists, and one of the values they instilled in me was that discovering and spreading knowledge is one of the greatest things you can do. So while I do need to make a living, I also love the idea of being able to gift knowledge for free. So, at least for now – I’ll continue the free weave-alongs.

Enough about the business. I’m writing this blog post because, for the first time in nearly five years, I am actually ON VACATION (and not a working one!) and thus have mental bandwidth to think about other things.

Which of course can lead to only one question: Where are the cats??

Here is Fritz, demonstrating the best way to get adoration (sit on whatever the silly human was paying attention to – then it will have NO CHOICE but to pet you!)

And here’s Her Royal Highness, Tigress herself, in a photo I call “Two Zen Masters” (despite the fact that neither of them is Zen!):

Tigress meets the Dalai Lama?

The poem reads

Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country
is spent developing the mind
instead of the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
but to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
in your heart and in the world
Work for peace
and I say again
Never give up
No matter what is happening
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up.

– His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama

Tomorrow I will be winding two new warps, one to go onto Maryam and one to go onto Grace. I’m actually planning a complete reconfiguration of both looms – the 12 modules currently on Grace are going into Maryam (still threaded – I haven’t TOTALLY lost my mind!), and the four modules currently on Maryam are going into Grace. Plus, I bought four more modules which are going into Grace, for a total of eight modules in Grace and 12 in Maryam.

Of course, that means threading or tying on 2,640 + 1,760 = 4,400 warp threads (plus winding, beaming, etc.). Perhaps I’d better read that poem again!

…And with that, I’m off to other things!

Stay tuned….