Tien Chiu

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May 2, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Searching for a theme

Time passes, and I’ve now dyed the sample warp. Here’s a not-great photo of it in the raddle, getting ready to be beamed onto the loom:

Sample warp being prepared for beaming onto the loom
New warp preparing to be beamed on

The warp is actually brighter-colored in real life, particularly the fuchsia-and-green one; it’s closer to orchid purple and moss green, very beautiful.

The warp is going onto Maryam, not onto a table loom. I had been debating this for most of a week. It really makes more sense to sample on Maryam, who has the same patterning capabilities as Grace, only with a lot less effort in putting on a warp (880 threads instead of 2,640). I was just feeling guilty about cutting off the 10 yards of warp still on Maryam, and feeling guilty about using Maryam for samples for an art piece when I had originally purchased her with the intent of using her for color samples.

Then some friends (thanks, Kaye and Sand!) pointed out that the 10 yard warp had been sitting there for months because I wasn’t enthused about weaving it, and that it made more sense to put on a warp that I would actually weave than one that would just sit there for another couple months. Also that I had no particular use for those color samples, and if I wasn’t enthused about them and had no particular use for them, why were they tying up my loom?

Point made. Off comes that warp. I got a nice pair of Kai scissors (best I’ve ever used!) recently, and they come out today.

That, of course, means that I have to figure out what to weave on that warp. I confess that I have no idea what I’m going to do with it yet, I just like the colors. But I need to choose some patterning (and some weft colors!) soon. Abstract swirls? Feather patterns? A traditional weaving draft but in nontraditional curlicues between pink/green and dark green? The possibilities are so endless that I’m feeling baffled. Suggestions welcome!

Since I’m at a total loss right now, I’m thinking it would be good to start with a theme, or maybe a title for the piece.

“Orchids and Moss”? “Bougainvillea Boogie”? ” “Jungle Birds”?

Or maybe I need to start with interesting patterning ideas and develop a title from there.

Your thoughts?

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: double weave cape

April 19, 2020 by Tien Chiu

More painted-warp cape dye samples

I’ve now done a few more sets of yarn samples for the painted-warp cape, testing out a few more dye approaches for the double weave warps. I started by trying the fuchsia/orange/yellow and deep indigo blue idea, dyeing these three skeins:

Three skeins of yarn, dyed in fuchsia/gold, fuchsia/orange/gold, and navy or indigo blue.
Fuchsia and Gold, Fuchsia/Orange/Gold, and Deep Navy skeins

The top skein is dyed using Fuchsia and Golden Yellow MX fiber-reactive dyes; the middle skein is dyed using Fuchsia, Soft Orange, and Golden Yellow. The bottom skein is dyed using Strong Navy. (All names are Dharma Trading Company (Procion) MX fiber-reactive dye names.)

What’s interesting about the top two skeins, if you look closely, is that Fuchsia and Golden Yellow strike about equally well on cotton and silk – there’s no difference in darkness in the threads in the top skein, which is only Fuchsia and Golden Yellow. But in the middle skein, which contains Orange as well, there is a noticeable difference in the areas that are orange – the strands of silk yarn (the shinier strands) are lighter, suggesting that the orange dye either absorbs or binds preferentially to the cotton yarn.

You can view this differential dyeing as either a fault or a positive trait. Or both. I happen to like it in the fuchsia/golden yellow/orange skein, and in the dark blue skein below it (where the silk strands are noticeably lighter than the cotton strands). However, it’s dreadfully inconvenient in this green sample, where I wanted different intensities of a single shade of forest green:

Green skein showing differential dyeing - some yellow and some blue-green areas

As you can see, I wound up with strands of pale yellow-green and bluish moss green instead, because the yellow and blue component dyes struck differently on the silk and cotton. (There’s no such thing as a “pure” green dye, alas.) The result is a gorgeous skein of yarn – that is not at all what I wanted.

I solved the green dye problem by doing what Ian and Teresa (and perhaps a few other people) recommended a few blog posts ago, and overdyeing. I dyed the top skein in the photo below variegated dark blue two blog posts ago; now I’ve overdyed it with gold. Now it’s a lovely dark forest green, with some subtle variation in color – but not nearly as much as the skein below, which was simply painted with green (blue + yellow) dyes in a single pass.

dark green skein on top, variegated yellow and medium green skein on bottom

Of course, neither skein is “right” or “wrong”; they’re both attractive color combinations, and both could create beautiful projects. However, the top skein is much closer to the effect I’m looking for, so I will paint one warp blue and then overdye it to get mottled forest green.

And the second warp?

I was not really happy with the combination of fuchsia/orange/yellow and dark blue. I’ve been working with that color combination for quite some time, and this time it didn’t “sing” to me.

Fortunately, I had decided to try another skein of fuchsia and green, this time using Golden Yellow instead of Sun Yellow. This was for technical reasons. Sun Yellow is a weak mixing color, meaning that it takes a LOT of Sun Yellow to shift either red or blue noticeably from its original color. So here’s the first skein, where green + fuchsia produced purple:

One of the things that happened (I think) was that the Sun Yellow simply got overpowered by the blue and the fuchsia dyes, resulting in purple and fuchsia. Golden Yellow is a MUCH stronger mixing color, and better able to hold its own against other colors.

Anyway, the next skein came out beautifully. Here it is, with the first skein (the one that produced fuchsia + purple) below it, for reference:

two fuchsia-and-green skeins, dyed differently

The first skein has much more subtle color variation, and much less dramatic differences between the threads. It looks much more unified than the other skein.

I think that’s because I applied just enough blue dye that – in the darker threads – the blue dye is the same darkness as the pink threads. I’m not going to go into all the color theory, but keeping the colors similar in darkness means they will blend together visually.

At any rate – I had eyeballed the dye mix for that particular sample, so the next step was to mix up dyes for another set of skeins using much more rigorous (aka, reproducible) measurements. Out came the digital scale and the measuring syringes. And here are the two final samples:

third set of fuchsia and green sample skeins

The top sample uses about 1/3 more blue than the bottom sample, so produces a cooler green. (The bottom skein looks more yellow on my screen than it does in real life; the top skein looks bluer than it ought. I could write reams about color inaccuracy in digital photos, but perhaps another time….)

I like the bottom sample better, so will be using that ratio of dyes.

The next step will be to test what my dye application method does on an actual warp. To dye the skein, I simply spread the skein out, dabbed bits of green dye on it, filled in the undyed areas with pink dye, flipped it over, and did the same on the other side. This produced what appeared to be unified areas of color. BUT – I don’t know whether those areas would continue to look unified if the dots and dabs were put into a warp. How would the threads rearrange themselves? How big would the areas of color be? What would it look like once woven?

Interesting questions. I don’t know, and I would like to know before dyeing, beaming, and tying on a monster 2,640-thread warp (20 yards long!).

Since Maryam is tied up with a different project, I’m arranging to borrow my friend Alfred’s Louet Jane table loom, so I can wind, dye, and put on a short warp, weave a little bit, and see what happens.

Stay tuned….

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: double weave cape

April 13, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Chocolate and cows

Or, how I spent my Easter weekend…

First, the chocolate. (Because chocolate is so much more fun than cows!)

You may recall that awhile back, I made myself some low-sugar chocolate. Well, predictably, Jamie hoovered up most of the low-sugar chocolate, and after it ran out, asked me to make more. So I ordered another 6 kg of Valrhona’s Alpaco (my favorite flavor of their line), 3 kg of unsweetened and 3 kg of their 66% cacao solids. Over the weekend, I mixed 1 kg of each, tempered it, and made some 83% Alpaco chocolate. It’s very intensely chocolate, and low-sugar enough that I can eat it in small doses without feeling too bad about it (my blood sugar is, fortunately, very well-controlled). And, mixed with nuts and dried fruit, it’s even tastier!

Here’s what I made. First, plain chocolate bars. Here they are in the molds:

chocolate bars, still in molds

These are the heavy-duty, rigid polycarbonate molds used by professional chocolatiers. I’ve tried the thin, flimsy plastic molds sold to home cooks and I don’t know how anyone can succeed with them – they drive me crazy. So when I got rid of all my other molds I kept these four back, just in case I wanted to make bars again someday. I’m glad I did!

And here are the bars, unmolded:

Finished chocolate bars

They’re not absolutely perfect – they have a slightly matte finish instead of a high sheen – but that may be partly because of the high cocoa content, as the unsweetened chocolate doesn’t have as much cocoa butter as a couverture does. I’m not entirely sure about that. Doesn’t matter; they look quite good and will taste even better!

Here’s the peanut gianduja (aka: peanut butter mixed with chocolate, like the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, only much much better). Technically it’s not a gianduja as it contains no powdered sugar, but don’t tell anyone!

peanut gianduja with raisins

The front part contains “regular” (unsulfured) raisins, the middle golden (sulfured) raisins. The back part is plain peanut gianduja, and very tasty it is.

And here is the cherry almond chocolate:

Dried cherries and roasted almonds mixed with chocolate

This is still in what I consider the most glorious stage of chocolate: when it hasn’t quite fully set, and is a little matte in sheen. I don’t know why I find this moment in chocolatiering so beautiful – perhaps because it is so transitory. It lasts only a minute or two. The chocolate goes from a liquid, translucent shine to the hard, waxy sheen you see in chocolate bars. But in between is this soft, matte glow that I just love. It says, “The chocolate is tempered perfectly, and will come out great.”

For those who have dyed with indigo, it’s like that magical transformation from the yellow-green of antifreeze through beautiful shades of aqua to pure indigo blue, after you take the fiber out of the dyebath and the pigment oxidizes. It’s wonderful to see.

Meanwhile, about the cows…Um, yes, the cows. Actually, only about a quarter of a cow. I hope, anyway.

I’ve wanted a chest freezer for quite a few years. I like making big batches of food because it’s more efficient, but of course the freezer is only big enough to hold 1-2 two-gallon batches of soup or chili. A bigger freezer would allow me to do a bigger variety of foods, so I can still cook efficiently without having to eat chili for two weeks straight.

But for a variety of reasons, we never quite got around to getting a chest freezer.

Then the coronavirus hit. And the idea picked up some urgency.

I will admit to being both a gourmet and a pessimist. I buy my meat at the farmer’s market, and what with social distancing and the throngs that usually populate the farmer’s market, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before they either shut down the farmer’s market or shopping at the farmer’s market becomes completely untenable due to long lines etc.

Plus, supply chain issues may become a problem. There have already been reports of meat packing plants having problems with workers getting sick. My guy doesn’t get his meat processed at a big meat packing plant, but there’s nothing to prevent the workers at his place getting sick either. And while I’m sure I could live without meat if I needed to, I happen to like grass-fed beef, it’s better for the environment than corn-fed beef, and I REALLY don’t want to support factory farming.

So…a chest freezer and a bulk meat purchase seemed like a good idea. I called him up, and it turns out that I can get a quarter cow for $5.50/lb hanging weight. Hanging weight is the weight of the steer when they hang up the carcass for dry aging, right after it’s been slaughtered. In this case, I asked for the smallest steer they had, which turned out to be 600 pounds. So that was 150 pounds of meat.

That’s still a LOT of meat for two people, but it turns out that you lose about 40% of the weight during the dry aging and butchering process, so it will work out to about 90 lbs of actual meat. I’m asking for bones + offal (all the stuff they’ll give me, anyway) so I might get a bunch more – we’ll see.

Anyway, we have a 7 cubic foot chest freezer (I had to exercise my Google-Fu and then call all over town to get it – apparently everyone and their kid sister wants one right now too, for the same reasons I want one!), and the quarter-cow will take up about half of it. I’d make a crack about the dead bodies taking up the other half, but since I quit my job as a project manager, I don’t need to dispose of dead bodies any more! 🙂

Now, of course, if you have a quarter-cow in the freezer, plus a quarter-freezer’s worth of cat treats that must not get stale (because priorities!), you have to organize it all. Dumping a hundred packages of beef into a freezer at random is a recipe for chaos. My tentative plan is to file the quarter-cow neatly into canvas tote bags, classified into steaks, roasts, ground beef, and so on. Using tote bags will make it easier to haul stuff in and out since tote bags (unlike cardboard boxes) come with handles. Wire baskets might be better, but I don’t have wire baskets to fit the chest freezer and am wary of scratching up the interior.

Of course, you then have the problem of differentiating a sea of identical canvas tote bags.

I bet you can guess where this is going…

Yep! I spent part of yesterday tie-dyeing canvas tote bags so I could differentiate frozen cow body parts:

The colors aren’t the most brilliant, but I was dyeing with the colors I was using for the dye samples for the double weave cape, and I was dyeing on an off-white canvas base. But I’m happy with the results anyway – I will certainly be able to tell them apart in the freezer!

And, with that, I’m off to other things. I’ll update you on the latest set of yarn samples once they’re dry.

Filed Under: All blog posts, food, chocolate, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: tie-dye

April 12, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Unexpected results

Today I’m giving thanks for my methodical, always-sample-first approach!

I was considering the “Just Do It” approach and just diving into dyeing my warp. But a little voice said, “Mixed fibers – you don’t know what will happen!” So I wound and dyed a small test swatch first. And boy howdy, am I glad I did!

Here’s the effect I was after – the fuchsia and green swatch on the right:

navy blue and fuchsia/green tie-dyed swatches

Here are the colors I used:

four dye swatches - fuchsia and green on top

And here is what I wound up with, after dyeing:

Yarn sample in fuchsia, salmon, and purple, with just a little bit of green

I’ve got lovely shades of fuchsia, purple, and pinky-orange, but where did the green go??

Here’s what I’m pretty sure happened.

The fuchsia struck equally well on both cotton and silk. No problem there.

The yellow struck preferentially on one fiber (I suspect the silk). It got zooped up immediately, leaving none for the other fiber.

The blue either attached preferentially to the other fiber (I think the cotton), OR the fuchsia and yellow hit first, and saturated out the dye sites on the silk (silk has fewer bonding sites than cotton), leaving nowhere for the blue to attach. So only one fiber got the blue dye.

The end result: the blue only dyed one fiber and the yellow only dyed one fiber. The fuchsia dyed both fibers. So I wound up with fuchsia in the areas I dabbed with fuchsia, a mix of salmon (fuchsia+yellow) and purple (fuchsia+blue) in the areas where fuchsia mixed with green, and blue and yellow and a teeny-tiny bit of green in the areas that were pure green.

Since I deliberately made most of the areas a mix of fuchsia and green (I didn’t want a whole lot of green), that meant that I wound up with a LOT of fuchsia-and-purple and almost no green.

So that idea is DOA. Good thing I sampled first!

At this point I have a few options:

I can try to get green from a different mix of dyes. There are four “pure” blues in the MX dyes and two yellows. A different combo may produce a green less inclined to “break” into component dyes. I’m a bit skeptical of this since I’ve heard all the blues are slower-striking than all the yellows, but it might be worth a try.

I can change the colors I’m trying to achieve. This seems like a sounder approach. If I use a single “pure” dye, or two more closely related colors than magenta and green (which are color-wheel opposites), I’ll probably get less chaos. If I want to see my pattern clearly, it would be good to use two colors of similar values (darkness). I’ll have to think about what colors, though, and of course do considerable sampling. I may be back to my favorite color combination, blue and orange-red, again. Not the worst of color combinations (I mean, it’s my favorite for a reason), but I’d kind of like to experiment with something different, too.

Whatever I do, though, I’ll definitely have to sample. Doing a mixed fiber warp is complicating things more than I’d expected. But that just makes it more fun!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: double weave cape

April 8, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Double weave cape

I’m moving along on my new project. I’ve decided it will be a cape, Vogue 8959:

Vogue 8959

The version she’s wearing requires 4.25 yards of 45″ fabric, or 3 yards of 60″ fabric. I could do a longer, floor length version that would require 7 yards of 45″ fabric or 6 yards of 60″ fabric, according to the pattern. Of course, since my warp is only 29″ wide, I’ll have to weave double the yardage.

I haven’t yet decided whether to do the floor length or the knee length version. Since I’m impatient to get started, I decided to weave first and ask questions later, so I wound a 20-yard warp, 29″ wide, which should be more than enough to sample, weave all the yardage for the floor-length version, and have plenty left over. If I do the shorter version, I’m sure I can come up with uses for the extra warp.

Because I wanted interesting color variation in the dyed yarns, I wound the warp with three different fibers: silk, mercerized cotton, and unmercerized cotton. They will take up the dyes differently, producing a slightly variegated effect even using the exact same dyes. I also used slightly different yarn sizes. The silk is 30/2 silk at 7500 yards per pound; the cotton yarns are 20/2 cotton at 8400 yards per pound, slightly thinner. They’re mixed throughout the warp, though, so the difference in thickness shouldn’t become a tension issue. It will just add a tiny bit of physical texture to the warp.

Here’s a pic of the warp being wound on my 3-meter warping mill:

20 yard warp being wound on my warping mill

There are actually two warps, since the piece will be double weave. Grace is threaded and sett at 90 epi, which means any warp that goes onto the loom needs to be sett at 90 ends per inch. Practically speaking, that means it either needs to be an incredibly fine-threads warp (half the weight of sewing thread) or double weave. Fine threads can be finicky, so I’m voting for double weave.

Since I’m doing double weave, I need to wind and dye two warp bouts. I’ve decided to dye one in mottled fuchsia and forest green, and the other in mottled indigo blue and navy blue. I’m currently planning to use an orange weft for both, but I want to do a lot of testing before I settle on a final color.

Here are the dye swatches for the colors I’m planning to use for the warp:

color swatches

I did do a quick simulation of what the colors might look like once woven. These colors are striped rather than splotchy because that’s all the weaving software can do, but it gives an idea of how the colors might blend visually:

color simulations
simulation of fuchsia and green threads with an orange weft

The finished cloth will not look anything like this, but at least it gives me a starting-point for thinking about the piece.

I’ve finished winding both warp bouts. Next step is to dye a small test bout in the fuchsia and forest green, both to test my dyeing technique and to see how the colors blend on the different fiber types. If I have time, I’ll do that today.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: double weave cape

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