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May 25, 2017 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Brainstorming

I had a lovely time in Oregon, teaching my “Power Up Your Process” workshop and giving a talk on brainstorming. I thought I’d share some of the ideas in the talk with you, as I think they address some common misconceptions about brainstorming.

First, brainstorming is NOT about creating a work of art. My brainstormed designs all look like they were drawn by a six year old child. In fact, I’m pretty sure a six-year-old could produce better art, given time. But brainstorming is not about taking time to create a great portrait. Brainstorming is about getting as many ideas as quickly as possible – so whatever captures the idea fastest is the best method for brainstorming. In my case, it’s a fast and largely incoherent scrawl.

To demonstrate, here are a few of the brainstormed designs for my piece “Goodbye, Ma,” plus the finished piece.

I knew I wanted a phoenix rising out of something, so I started with some thumbnail sketches to show different poses for the bird. Each of these took only a few seconds, and I didn’t stop to think or adjust details. The sketches are crude, but they were perfect for the occasion, giving me a collection of ideas in just a few minutes.

Next I took some of my favorite poses and sketched them roughly in black and white. Each sketch took less than a minute.

Thumbnail sketches for my piece "Goodbye, Ma" — Thumbnail sketches for my piece “Goodbye, Ma”

Next I took some of my ideas and developed them a little more. Here are a few variants, each of which took about 5-10 minutes:

phoenix brainstorming - rising from flames — phoenix brainstorming – rising from flames

phoenix brainstorming - rising from black hole — phoenix brainstorming – rising from black hole

After I was done brainstorming, I started developing the piece. Here’s the first iteration – just the overall pose and a hint of shading:

After doing that version, I added some shading, and added some blue to “pop” the oranges.

second iteration - light and shadow — second iteration – light and shadow, complementary color

Around this point I realized that it would be great to have the phoenix flying out of a cremation urn, rather than just appearing out of nowhere. So I added a crude sketch to check positioning, and also changed the wing feathers around a bit, experimenting.

phoenix - flying up from urn — phoenix – flying up from urn

Having checked the positioning, I drew in the urn and re-revised the wings to look a bit more fiery:

phoenix with a better-drawn cremation urn

I felt that the piece needed something to indicate that the phoenix was flying upwards, so I added a moon. I also straightened out the feathers and made them more stylistically compatible with the tail:

And in the final iteration, I decided to remove the feet, and made the blue feathers more plentiful. Here is the final drawing for “Goodbye, Ma”:

And here is the finished piece:

Coming back to the start again, here is the first brainstormed sketch:

I used to despair because my brainstormed sketches looked so crude. But now I’ve realized that that’s exactly what they should be. The idea is to test many ideas, so you can select the best one to develop further. Childish scrawls are perfect.

May 17, 2017 by Tien Chiu 10 Comments

A narrow shave

The good news first: after almost six months of setback after setback, I finished threading my loom!!

I know it doesn’t look like much, but at a density of 120 ends per inch, that’s 1,760 threads – quite an effort!

Just as I was about to pop the cork on the champagne bottle, I noticed that I had run out of threads at the very end. There were four empty heddles. What could have caused four empty heddles?

…and then I realized that I had missed four heddles early on, and as a result, virtually all the threads were threaded in the wrong order. Normally you would thread all the heddles in position #1 on the front four modules in sequence front to back, then thread all the heddles in position #1 on the back four modules, again front to back. I had managed to shift the sequence, so instead of being threaded 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 front to back, they were threaded 5,6,7,8,1,2,3,4 front to back. This is the sort of mistake that leads to guzzling a fifth of whiskey and then passing out on the studio floor. And then giving up, pulling everything out, and starting six months’ work over again.

Fortunately, before I went out to get the aforementioned bottle of whiskey, I decided to email the Jacquard Study Group in hopes of finding a solution. I was quickly reassured that I could fix the problem in software, either by “casting out” heddles on the TC-2 or by changing the order of the heddles in the software. Hooray! Disaster (narrowly) averted. But it was a close shave.

Around the time I breathed my sigh of relief, the doorbell rang. It was the mailman, delivering the mail. There were two copies of Shuttle, Spindle, and Dyepot in the mail. Curious why I would be getting two copies, I paged through the magazine. And there was a wonderful review of my book Master Your Craft!

So exciting.

I’m off in a few days to teach my “Power Up Your Process” workshop for the Eugene Weavers’ Guild. I’m also presenting my “Get Wild: Secrets of Brainstorming” program for them. I’m looking forward to meeting my students and teaching the class!

May 10, 2017 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Weaving with Non-Traditional Materials

I spent this past weekend at CNCH, where I took Giovanna Imperia’s class “Weaving with Non-Traditional Materials”. There wasn’t a whole lot of theory in this class – instead, Giovanna brought a large selection of non-traditional materials and turned us loose to experiment. I wove two sets of samples – one using a very fine warp of black silk yarn (about the weight of sewing thread), and one using a medium size monofilament combined in stripes with glow in the dark thread.

My first two samples were woven in retro-reflective thread, and 42-gauge stainless steel wire:

retro-reflective thread and 42 gauge stainless steel wire woven sample

Both of these are much more interesting than they look in the photo. The stainless steel thread (top sample) sparkles, and the section where I packed it down tightly looks like pure metal. But it flexes like cloth! I have been told that if I wash it, it will crinkle up in interesting ways, and it also has “memory”, so creasing it would produce interesting effects as well.

The thin textured “stripes” are reed marks, where the thin pieces of steel dividing the sections of the reed left spaces in the cloth. With regular cloth, these marks generally come out in the wash; metallic thread, of course, is much stiffer, so the marks cannot be removed. Which is fine – there’s nothing wrong with reed marks, they just produce a different result.

The retro-reflective thread (bottom sample) is also interesting. Retro-reflective thread is the same stuff that manufacturers put into the trim on cycling jackets, the backs of runners’ shoes, etc. to make cyclists and runners more visible at night. It’s made of plastic coated with a ton of tiny reflective glass beads, and appears dull gray until you shine a light directly at it – then it is brilliantly reflective.

I couldn’t get a really strong light on it because I didn’t have one, but here is a photo of the same sample with a small flashlight pointed directly at the cloth:

retro-reflective thread and 42 gauge stainless steel wire woven sample - brightly lit — retro-reflective thread and 42 gauge stainless steel wire woven sample – brightly lit

You can see how the fabric “lights up” even with weak directed lighting.

Here is the next section – steel-core thermoplastic yarn, 42-gauge copper wire, and coated copper wire:

coated copper wire, copper wire, steel-core thermoplastic woven cloth

Working from bottom to top, the steel core thermoplastic yarn looks utterly boring in the sample, but it has some interesting characteristics. Thermoplastic materials can be shaped with the application of heat, and will keep that shape once cooled. I haven’t enough in the sample to do lots of experiments, but I am tempted to order some and try more complex experiments with it.

The 42-gauge copper wire, which is the very thin copper-colored section, is beautiful too. Because the wire is very fine, at this sett (36 ends per inch), it weaves up entirely weft-faced, so it looks like an interestingly textured piece of pure copper! But it is very flexible. I didn’t weave much of it, though, because the thread is so fine it takes forever to weave. That 1/4″ sample took almost 20 minutes to weave!

The coated copper wire, the top sample, wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as the pure copper wire. But it weaves up a lot faster, and (unlike the copper wire) won’t patina with age, plus it apparently does interesting things when washed. So I will have to judge after wet-finishing the cloth.

Next up was a vinyl yarn, “superfine jelly” yarn:

vinyl yarn - superfine jelly yarn woven sample — vinyl yarn – superfine jelly yarn woven sample

I didn’t find this particularly interesting, but it is also thermoplastic (keeps a shape once heated), so I need to try steaming it to see what happens. It is also translucent, and the colors are appealingly bright, so it may be worth further investigation.

Next up was a sequined yarn from my own stash. I wove it both tightly and loosely, to see what would happen:

Unfortunately the width of the sample was close to the spacing of the sequins, so they tended to clump (particularly visible in the top sample). But I like the effect, and the base yarn is polyester, meaning it will also be thermoplastic. I can see doing some very interesting things with origami-in-cloth with both this yarn and some of the metallic yarns.

Next I experimented with inlays using fancy yarns:

From bottom to top, the samples are the sequin yarn, a very unexciting blue monofilament, black silk ground cloth with a thread of rainbow fancy yarn, an opalescent ground cloth with a thread of fancy yarn, and a spectacular pigtail yarn from my stash.

The opalescent (green background) ground cloth really isn’t done justice by the photo. It has a shimmer and sparkle that vanishes in the photo. It’s actually a transparent nylon thread with an opalescent coating, and looks different depending on what’s in the warp. Here the warp is black silk, so it takes on a darker, “solid” look.

And ah, the pigtail yarn! I am disgustingly happy with this sample, for no reason other than that I think it’s super cool. Here’s a better photo that also shows a bit of the unwoven yarn:

As you can see, the yarn has little “pigtails” coming out of it, and is a lovely heathered purple/pink plied with an opalescent thread. This results in a thick, textured fabric that I’ve fallen in love with for no good reason! I am racking my brains for how to use it, though – it’s far too scratchy for a scarf (unless I use a different yarn in the part that goes around the neck) and it doesn’t seem quite appropriate for a wall hanging, table runner, or other decorative item. Nonetheless, I love this sample. Someday I’ll figure out how to use this yarn!

Finally, I rewarped the loom with a transparent monofilament, striped with glow-in-the-dark thread. This was useful for transparency effects, of course, so I started with a small plaid of glow-in-the-dark thread and monofilament, framing an inlay of a fancy yarn:

fancy yarn inlay on handwoven monofilament and glow in the dark thread

I love the light and airy feel of this piece – it would be great hanging in a window, I think.

Next, I wove a sample (bottom of photo) in a very fine clear monofilament, with an inlay of copper wire:

transparent monofilament with copper wire inlay handwoven cloth

I’m very fond of this sample, though I didn’t weave much of it because the very fine monofilament took forever to weave! Nylon is thermoplastic as well (I think), and you can see that the cloth is both tightly woven and translucent. This would look fantastic as a three-dimensional piece using Chris Palmer’s Shadowfolds origami techniques. Super exciting!

The rest of the samples were relatively unexciting, but may change interestingly when washed – I have to do that as well, perhaps this weekend.

And that’s it for today!

May 1, 2017 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Another dye cube, and some thoughts on color mixing

I finished the Procion MX Sun Yellow – Mixing Red – Mixing Blue dye “cube” a week or so ago, but only finished photographing it a day or two ago. I found it fascinating to compare this “cube” to the Gold – Mixing Red – Intense Blue cube I finished a few weeks ago – here are some photos and analysis for you.

We’ll start with a photo of the Sun Yellow – Mixing Red and Gold – Mixing Red color combinations (no blue in either mix):

Combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples — Sun Yellow – Mixing Red – Mixing Blue light cube level 0

These were all dyed at the same concentrations. Left to right, the concentrations are 0, 0.06%, 0.12%, 0.25%, and 0.5% DOS in yellow; bottom to top are the same set of concentrations in Mixing Red. There is virtually no difference between the two color combinations except in the bottom row – which is pure Sun Yellow on left and and pure Gold on the right. This is largely because the Gold is a slightly more reddish yellow (like Sun Yellow with a bit of red added), so when the Mixing Red gets into the act, it overwhelms the very slight hue difference between Sun Yellow and Gold, making the combinations look identical. Put another way, the Gold looks a bit like Sun Yellow plus maybe .005% Mixing Red, so when you throw 0.06% Mixing Red into the mix, the 0.005% difference gets obliterated.

Now, let’s see what happens when you add a tiny bit of the two different blues to the two essentially-identical combinations of yellow and blue. This is the same mix of dyes as in the previous photo, except with .06% Mixing Blue added on the left, and .06% Intense Blue on the right.

Here you can see that the Intense Blue (right) is a much weaker mixing color than the Mixing Blue (left) – it has a slightly dulling effect on the bright colors in the first photo, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of the Mixing Blue. The Intense Blue doesn’t even have enough mixing power to turn the Gold at bottom left to green!

Here is the same cube with a little more of the blues: 0.12% Mixing Blue on left, 0.12% Intense Blue on the right.

Again, you can see that the Intense Blue on the right is far weaker than the Mixing Blue on the left. You can also start to see differences in the hue between the Intense Blue-Mixing Red mixes and the Mixing Blue/Mixing Red mixes – the Mixing Blue combinations produce less saturated (duller) colors than the Intense Blue/Mixing Red combinations.

What happens if you compare the dyes at roughly similar combinations of visual strength? Here is 0.12% Mixing Blue on the left, and 0.25% Intense Blue on the right.

You’ll notice that the Intense Blue – even at double the concentration – still isn’t quite as strong as the Mixing Blue, but that it produces a slightly “cooler” set of colors than the Mixing Blue, which has redder undertones.

Here is level 3 – 0.25% of each of the blues:

Now the temperature shift is becoming more obvious, as is the overall brighter (more saturated) colors achieved with the Intense Blue (left). That’s largely because the Intense Blue is a more saturated blue than the Mixing Blue (right). When you mix two colors together you can never get a more saturated shade than the original colors. But it’s also because the Intense Blue is weaker (= less blue to dull down the oranges) and because it has more yellow in it than the Mixing Blue, which means it dulls down the oranges in the middle of the “square” less strongly (they both contain lots of yellow).

Here is the final level of the “light” cube, with 0.5% of each of the blues:

And here are the darker shades. I didn’t have time to set up a comparison of these to the Intense Blue combinations, but adding them for completeness, so you can see the full set of concentrations. Left to right, and top to bottom, the concentrations are 0, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, and 4% DOS for Sun Yellow and Mixing Red. Each level has a single amount of Mixing Blue, indicated in the caption.

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 0% blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 0% blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 0.5% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 0.5% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 1% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 1% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 2% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 2% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 4% blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 4% blue

And that’s it for now!

April 21, 2017 by Tien Chiu 6 Comments

Tie-dyed rebel

The last few weeks have been extraordinarily busy but also depressingly lacking in any creative work. The executive director at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles decided to move on to other opportunities, so resigned her position early last week. Since I’m the President of the Board of Directors at the Museum, that means most of my time has been spent dealing with Museum logistics and preparing for the search for a new ED. So, lots of activity, but nothing interesting on the creative front.

Which is why I finally rebelled and decided to do a tie-dye marathon. I spent one entire day tying interesting patterns into twelve garments: eight shirts, two dresses, and two pairs of leggings. Then I soaked them in soda ash and let them sit until they were completely dry. Then I spent another half-day yesterday carefully applying dyes, and washed out the dye today. Here are the results, with commentary.

I’ll start with the attempts at an eight-pointed lotus design:

tie-dyed T-shirt with a fourfold symmetric design — This was an attempt to fold an eight-pointed “lotus flower” design. I was a bit surprised that it actually came out as a square! It’s lovely, though, so I’m not too sad that I failed at the lotus.

Another attempt at an eight-pointed lotus. This one came out as a diamond – go figure! I like it, though I think it’s a little too dark in the center. I wouldn’t normally put a dark design against a fiery background, but I was starting to run out of dye, and the only dyes I had enough of to form a background were yellow and orange. I like the color combination, though!

A third attempt at the lotus. I like the strong design but think the colors are a bit “too much”. This would have looked better in just two or three colors.

Here are two “lotus variants,” one in leggings and one in a dress.

tie-dyed summer dress — This dress features Yet Another Lotus Attempt (are you detecting a theme here?), this time as a very small fiery “star” against a black-and-purple “spider pattern”

Another (very small) lotus attempt on the thighs, plus a starburst further down. I like these – they’ll be very cheerful for doing yoga in the mornings.

I was a bit obsessed with doing lotus/mandala designs. I think I tied them correctly, but I may not have applied the dye in the right patterns to get an eight-pointed design. Next time I will try again! But they are not failures in any sense of the word – I love them!

You’ll be glad to know that I did eventually get bored of tying mandala patterns. Here’s a shirt that I call “Sunset in the Valley”:

tie-dye t-shirt with a sun and hills — Sunset in a valley, as interpreted in tie-dye. I like this one a lot.

And here is a shirt that was folded in half lengthwise, then folded in a spiral design, resulting in two symmetric half-spirals. There is too much black in this shirt for my taste, but I love orange and yellow, so will probably wear it anyway:

And – as a reward for reading all the way down – here are my two very favorite shirts. The first one I’m calling “Galaxy” – it’s a fairly common tie-dye pattern, but I threw in some additional stars and planets to make it more intriguing:

Tie-dyed “galaxy”. This one was time-consuming to fold and tie, mainly because of the many tiny little “stars”.

And here is my favorite of all: a rainbow “spider” pattern. This is created by folding a T-shirt in half lengthwise, then coiling it in a spiral to give a symmetric half-spiral pattern.

Rainbow "spider" tie-dyed T-shirt — Rainbow “spider” tie-dyed T-shirt

Tomorrow and Sunday I’m taking a much-needed rest break from Museum affairs, and going to an intriguing workshop instead. Chris Palmer, the author of the origami-in-cloth book Shadowfolds, is teaching how to combine the origami methods in Shadowfolds with arashi shibori to produce some very interesting and beautiful pieces. Pix when finished, of course!

Finally, because it has been far too long since the cats have graced this page, here are two pictures of the lords of the household: