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September 6, 2017 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Fruitcake season!

The holiday season is fast approaching. Fortunately, retailers have not yet realized that September is the perfect month for putting out Christmas decorations (though with the ongoing retail arms race, they may get there in a few years), leaving the field wide open for…fruitcake!

I love making fruitcake. Not the dry, tasteless fruit brick that appears in shops around Christmastime – real fruitcake, with all kinds of tasty goodies in it, lovingly sprinkled with liquor once a week for six weeks, then given an extra month for all the flavors to mellow together. A good fruitcake is like fine wine: while you can eat it right out of the oven, it only reaches the height of its complex, delicious flavor if allowed to age first.

Because good fruitcake takes time, August and early September are fruitcake-making time, at least in this household. (And thank goodness I can beat the retailers to the gun on SOMETHING!)

Of course, you can take fruitcake-aging too far. The Antarctic Heritage Trust reports that a 106-year-old fruitcake has been found in the huts used by early Antarctic explorers, and was probably part of Captain Robert Scott’s doomed expedition, as he attempted to reach the South Pole in 1911. The fruitcake tin was rusted through, but the fruitcake itself was in excellent condition. Lizzie Meek of the Antarctic Heritage Trust reported, “There was a very, very slight rancid butter smell to it, but other than that, the cake looked and smelled edible!”

106 year old fruitcake (Antarctic Heritage Trust)

Because my fruitcakes contain 16 kinds of fruits, nuts, and candied citrus peel, it’s not practical to make just one fruitcake. (Especially since I candy all the fruit and citrus peels myself, so they come in pint jars.) Since I don’t want to skimp on the additions, and anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I typically make quite a few fruitcakes. This year, I made 6 large fruitcakes and 10 small ones. They contained 17.5 pounds of goodies:

17.5 pounds of fruitcake additions — 17.5 pounds of fruitcake goodies!

Plus 7 quarts of cake batter:

Mixed into a lusciously full-of-treats batter:

…baked in a 275-degree oven for 2.5 hours…

…until golden brown:

Now they’re wrapped in plastic wrap and nestled into clean loaf pans, ready to be sprinkled with liquor. One tablespoon of liquor for the big cakes, half a tablespoon for the little cakes, once a week for six weeks. 1/3 of the cakes are being soaked with rum, 1/3 with bourbon whiskey, and 1/3 with a mix of Amaretto and Southern Comfort.

Of course, the arrival of fruitcake season foreshadows the beginning of chocolate season….the test kitchen won’t open until mid-October, but I’m already starting to think about potential new flavors!

August 23, 2017 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

End of a (dyeing) era

Yes, the 1500-skein Procion MX dyeing project is FINALLY at an end! Here are the last 250 skeins hanging up to dry:

Sun Yellow, Fuchsia, Navy Blue dyed skeins hanging up to dry

It took a bit over eight months start to finish, but all the dyeing is finally done. (Many thanks to my friend Kaye, who has been helping out!)

The project, however, is not quite done. My friend Carla is still winding the skeins onto cards – two sets of cards, one for me and one for her, plus two sets of mini-skeins for the other people who offered to split costs. She is making amazingly fast progress – she’ll be finishing up the 1000th skein sometime in the next few days. After that we’ll go on hiatus until I fly out to Maryland to visit family, and can bring the two final sets of skeins for her to work on. (On my last trip, I brought 750 skeins – which meant two large suitcases full of yarn! My family was wondering why I needed two suitcases and a carryon for a three-day trip…)

This reminds me of a poem by the second-greatest sage of the 20th century, aka Shel Silverstein:

Shel Silverstein was one of my best-loved writers as a kid…this poem is from Where the Sidewalk Ends. My copy is more than a little ratty, but then, it’s been read countless times since my mother gave it to me at the tender age of seven. (It was my favorite book for most of my childhood – superseded only by Lord of the Rings, years later.)

And I just found out that more books of his poetry and illustrations were published after his death! I’m so excited – just ordered my copies from Amazon. Yes, his poems are silly, but there’s great wisdom in silliness, too.

And – speaking of wisdom – are you wondering who the greatest sage of the 20th century might be? Why, isn’t it obvious? It’s none other than Mr. Theodor Geisel, who wrote my personal motto:

If you never did, you should!
These things are fun, and fun is good.

– Dr. Seuss, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

We now end this outburst of poetry and return you to your usual creative-mischief channel. 🙂

August 18, 2017 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

The science of art

I’ve been having a lot of fun the last few weeks doing scientific experiments about art. (Hey, you can take the girl out of science, but you can’t take the science out of the girl! Even as an artist, I still work using the scientific method, because I find it so effective.) These science-of-art experiments have mostly been made for my latest Warp & Weave blog post. The post is about how to work with clashing colors. The secret is pretty simple. Clashing colors jar the eye because they contrast strongly, generally in both hue (color family) and value (lightness/darkness). So the solution is simply to reduce the contrast between them, either by adding a transitional color in between (if you are doing warp or weft stripes), or by using a weft that blends them into more compatible colors. (More details in the blog post.)

This all makes sense, but to come up with the blog post I had to do quite a few scientific experiments. (Which is what made it fun!). I don’t think I had ever thought deeply about what makes two colors clash before, for example, or to define what it means to clash – up until then, I’d relied on an intuitive definition. Like the Supreme Court justice said, “I know it when I see it.” So I pulled out my collection of 500+ skein leftovers from my dyeing project, and started shuffling colors around, looking at which ones clashed (to my eye) and which didn’t. Then I tried to figure out exactly which characteristics/differences between the colors caused them to clash. I finally concluded that clashing colors resulted from a high difference in value (lightness/darkness) plus a difference in hue (color family), and that while saturation (brightness/dullness) could contribute to clashing, the effect wasn’t as profound as the first two. You can see this in these three photos:

Most people would say the first two yarns clash. This is because these two yarns contrast across all three color characteristics – orange and blue are opposites on the color wheel, the navy blue is much darker than the orange, and the orange is much more saturated (brighter) than the blue.

Many people might still say that the next two colors clash, but to a much lesser degree than the first pair. That’s because the blue, while the exact same hue as the navy blue, has been lightened up to be the same value (light/dark) as the orange.

Most people would say that the purples in the last photo, while high-contrast, do not clash. That’s because they have big value and saturation differences, but no difference in hue.

By coming up with various theories, then comparing and contrasting lots of different pairs of colors to test this theory, I eventually arrived at a set of characteristics that defined the color combinations that appear to clash.

After that, of course, I had to formulate some hypotheses about how to create harmonious cloth with clashing colors, and test those hypotheses. So I pulled out three yarns from my stash that appeared to clash, and did some yarn wraps to test my hypotheses:

And then I wove samples with many different wefts to test my theories on what would resolve the clashing and produce a harmonious fabric:

Most of my theories stood the test, but some didn’t. So then I had to discard the old ideas and formulate new theories, then test the new ones. And then weave more samples to illustrate my points. This research, while fun, also ate a couple days. But lots of people have been saying they find it useful, and that’s a good thing. (If this has piqued your interest, check out the full blog post!)

I’m really enjoying my scientific analysis of color – it’s satisfying a deep-rooted need to explore and explain the world. I was raised by two brilliant scientists, so even though my focus is art, I still have a passion for identifying, analyzing, and then explaining the solution to whatever puzzles I encounter. It’s not as obviously science as technical experiments in neurobiology, but the concept and process are the same. It’s the science of art, and it’s endlessly fascinating.

I’ve also been working on an article for an upcoming issue of Handwoven, which will be the “Inspiration” issue. I can’t say much about the article, of course, but here’s a teaser:

I’m currently creating/weaving everything else I need for the article, and it’s coming out beautifully.

Finally, I have one more EXCELLENT piece of news: my wedding dress is going to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan! This is a huge relief – the dress has been in limbo ever since the American Textile History Museum closed, and I was really worried about its fate. But it looks like it is safe now. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me!

August 1, 2017 by Tien Chiu 11 Comments

Mechanical vs. computerized looms

I’ve now woven a few warps on Lady Ada, and am starting to get the hang of working on a treadle loom again. I haven’t owned a treadle loom since I was a wee beginner – I bought one in October 2006 when I started weaving, but within seven months I had moved to a computer-driven dobby loom. I’ve been weaving on various computer-driven looms ever since. So despite having almost eleven years of weaving experience, I’m basically a complete novice to weaving on treadle looms.

What’s different between a treadle loom and a computerized loom like my AVL 40-shaft loom or Amazing Grace?

Quite a bit. They both require skill and attention to produce good work, but the needed skills are different. On a treadle loom like Lady Ada (who, for new readers, is an 8-shaft Baby Wolf), everything is mechanical. Before you throw a single pick, you have to choose a treadle, press it, and hope that you tied the correct shafts to that treadle, so it raises the correct set of threads. Then you throw, beat, release the treadle. And then you have to find the next treadle in the sequence, press it, and so on.

This probably sounds like a stupidly simple process, but there are all sorts of mistakes that can be made, and I have been merrily making all of them. In the course of a single afternoon, I managed to make at least eight different kinds of mistakes, most of them repeatedly. Who knew there were so many ways to screw up weaving a simple 4-shaft twill? But because I am an extremely talented and determined woman, I managed to tie the treadles incorrectly, press the wrong treadle, lose track of where I was in the treadling sequence, accidentally treadle the sequence backwards, and a few other errors which I won’t mention because they are simply too embarrassing. All in the course of a single afternoon! It took me nearly 45 minutes to weave a single eight-inch sample of 2/2 twill, and I’m not going to tell you how many times I had to start over or unpick things.

Of course, that was only the start. I also rapidly discovered that advancing the warp on Lady Ada can be an exciting journey into adventure. How was I to know that if you press too hard on the friction brake release, the warp flings itself off the warp beam with the speed and fury of a striking snake? Or that when you advance the warp, you have to be super totally careful to get the tension just the way it was before, if you don’t want weird lines in your cloth?

Here’s the kind of cloth I was producing that first afternoon. The right side is plain weave, the left side is 3/1 twill.

Obviously I was having major problems keeping the beat even – the yellow striations are where the yellow weft beat in more densely, and the black stripes are where the weft was less dense.

Since then I’ve gotten a bit better, and Lady Ada has gotten a complete tune-up thanks to my friends Sandi and Kaye. Here’s a more recent sample:

There’s still some variation, but not nearly as bad.

The challenge of weaving on a treadle loom is that you are doing all the work. It’s up to you to choose the right treadle, to tie the treadle to the shafts correctly, to advance the cloth, to set the tension, and a host of other small details that most computer-driven looms handle for you. So if you’ve spent virtually your entire weaving life on a high-tech loom, as I have, you probably haven’t learned how to do all those mechanical things. You haven’t needed to!

Until, of course, you sit down at a lovely little treadle loom and try to weave something…

I’m not saying that a treadle-loom weaver is more skilled than a high-tech-loom weaver, by the way. The skills are different. Amazing Grace, my TC-2 jacquard loom, is about as high-tech as you can get in a hand-operated loom. When I’m weaving, I just push a button and she automatically lifts all the correct threads; after I’ve thrown the pick and beaten in the weft, she automatically advances to the next pick in the sequence. If the phone rings or I need to run off to rescue something from the cats, I don’t need to worry, because Grace will remember exactly where I was in the sequence when I got up. Grace maintains a precise warp tension for me automatically, using embedded sensors to keep the tension exactly identical over every inch of weaving. Finally, she auto-advances every fraction of an inch, keeping the fell line in exactly the same place, so it’s easier to keep the beat even. Had I woven that black-and-yellow sample on Grace, I wouldn’t have had any of the unsightly striations because Grace handles all those adjustments for me.

But working on Grace requires a different set of skills. For example, you need to know how to maintain and troubleshoot her. Treadle looms, once you’ve got them working, are mechanically simple. If you press a treadle, and the wrong shafts lift, it’s because you tied it up wrong. On Grace, or on her predecessors, if the wrong threads lift, it could be any of a long list of possible problems, each with a different solution.

You also need to be able to design things to weave on her. It took me years to figure out how to design effectively for multishaft, computer-driven looms. Using Grace to her full potential requires a much deeper understanding of weave structures than my previous looms did – plus I had to upgrade to more powerful weaving software and design techniques to do it.

Grace (the jacquard loom) also requires making more adjustments as you’re designing and weaving. I am weaving about 200 color samples on Grace for my current project, and then I’ll weave an aspect ratio sample that tells me how much I need to stretch or squash my design to compensate for shrinkage, etc. All that will feed into an incredibly complicated project that is far beyond anything I would attempt with a treadle loom.

I love Grace because she can produce incredibly complex designs, and requires serious thinking (I love a challenge). I love Ada because she is simple yet beautiful, much quicker to set up and use, and exercises a totally different set of skills. (Plus, if the power goes out, she’s the same wonderful loom, whereas Grace turns into a 1000-pound rock.)

All that said, having now woven about 15 yards of warp on Lady Ada, I’m back to working on Grace for awhile. Last week I dyed the last of the yarns I’ll need for Everett’s stole, and this morning I started weaving the rest of the samples I’ll need to complete the design. I’m weaving a total of 200 sample swatches – here are the first 30:

These are for the bottom of the lake. I’m using four wefts: metallic silver, deep indigo blue, teal, and a medium green. This batch of samples shows shadings with all possible pairs of those weft colors on top, plus the four possibilities with one weft on top.

After I’m done weaving all 200 swatches, I’ll photograph each one, color-average it into a single shade, and do some more design voodoo to convert my initial sketch into a full draft.

If you’ve forgotten what the stole project looked like, here’s the sketch again:

The thin red line running down the center (if you click for the larger image) is where the stole will be divided when draped around the neck and shoulders.

The fabric for the stole will need to be about 60″ long, and the samples are weaving up at 230 picks per inch. So the stole will require 13,800 picks (weft threads), or about 20 hours of weaving. I better get going!

July 28, 2017 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

A new undertaking

As you may have guessed from my relative silence over the last few months, putting together a new business is no cakewalk. Warp & Weave has been soaking up most of my creative energy for several months now, which is why I’ve been posting less frequently here – though I do hope to get back to a more frequent posting schedule once I’ve gotten past the frenetic startup phase.

If you’re wondering what Warp & Weave is about, it’s my online teaching website. It’s focused on how to choose and use colors in handwoven designs. This is a topic that puzzles many people – in fact, when I did a reader survey to see what people’s greatest creative challenges were, color was one of the most frequently mentioned concerns. “I feel like an idiot when it comes to color,” “Color terrifies me,” “I don’t understand color at all” were pretty common responses.

And yeah, I’ve had my share of color mishaps (and feeling like a color idiot, too). One of my earliest projects was a shawl made of expensive silk/wool yarn (Jaggerspun Zephyr), in colors that I hand-dyed myself. Because I had dyed eight brilliantly vivid hues, I thought I was going to get a beautiful rainbow shawl. Surprise! I got a dull, muddy mess instead. The shawl is still stashed away in a drawer somewhere, a testament to color disasters.

It’s not surprising that color mishaps happen fairly frequently to weavers. Weaving is the most complicated fiber art when it comes to color, because we are always mixing warp and weft in our work. In knitting, it’s easy to put a patch of solid purple next to a blob of bright yellow – in weaving, a purple warp and a yellow weft will interlace, creating various mixes of purple and yellow (how much of each depends on the weave structure, among other things). So weavers need to understand color mixing far better than other fiber artists in order to create attractive projects.

That said, color is not some mystical understanding that is bestowed on some people via divine guidance. Color follows certain basic rules, and anyone who understands them can design effectively with color. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, nobody is teaching those rules. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few years studying color theory and color mixing (that’s part of why I dyed 1,500 sample skeins this year), and while I’ve found bits and pieces of color theory in various fiber-related books, I haven’t found a single resource that explicitly covers color theory as it relates to weaving.

My ambition is to fix that. I want to give people a systematic understanding of color, so they can choose and use their own handweaving palettes with confidence. I also want to dispel the illusion that it’s some supernatural talent. I was a color idiot until I spent several years educating myself. Now I know how to use color effectively. So I can tell you from personal experience that color is not an inborn talent; it’s a skill. It’s knowledge that anyone can learn. And it doesn’t have to take years and years; in fact, I’m hoping to impart all that knowledge in weeks, not years.

My plan, with Warp & Weave, is to do two things:

First, I’m writing a biweekly article/blog post about how to use color in handweaving. The article will focus on solving specific color problems that weavers face. For example, the blog post that was published this morning is all about what to do when your bright colors weave up into muddy, boring ones.

Second, I’m developing some online classes about color in weaving. (You can sign up for Early Bird notification here.) The intent of those classes is to teach people how to design with color – how to pick a color palette, color proportions, and weave structure to produce whatever kind of fabric you want. The difference between the blog articles and the classes is that the blog articles solve individual problems; the classes will teach you a system that enables you to identify and solve your own problems.

This is a huge undertaking, of course – way more effort than writing my book was. It’s not just about understanding and explaining the system, which I could do relatively easily. It’s also about weaving samples to illustrate each of my points, creating and recording slide decks, learning to shoot and edit videos, and a ton of other stuff required to create and sell online classes. But I’m really looking forward to it, because difficult projects are interesting, and I think I can do a lot of good for the handweaving community by demystifying color. I also think I might be able to make a living at it, which would be good. (For me, if not for you. 🙂 )

This does not mean that I’m giving up my other projects. Far from it! I just finished dyeing the last of the skeins for my stole commission. I’ve gotten Amazing Grace’s warp tied on, debugged, and ready to weave, which means I can get going on weaving samples for Everett’s stole. I’m also playing with a fractal design program so I can create more pieces like Marvelous Mandelbrot. On the dyeing side of the house, I am almost (only one dye session left!!) done dyeing the 1,500 cotton sample skeins, and getting ready to embark on my 1,500 silk fabric dye samples.

So there is lots going on on the creative front, and I plan to write plenty about those projects in this blog. But there will be a lot of activity on Warp & Weave, too – so if you are a weaver, and interested in color, you may want to hop on over to the site and sign up for the newsletter, so you’ll find out about blog posts there.

Coming soon on this blog: a new post about my experiences with Lady Ada, my new-to-me 8-shaft Baby Wolf loom, and the hilarious things that can happen when you pair a high-tech weaver with a low-tech loom. Watch for it!

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