textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

June 11, 2018 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Pictures of 1000 dye samples are now online!

A quick note to let y’all know: I’ve posted 1000 of my 1500 dye samples on my website, along with an extensive write-up about my dye process. The other 500 samples are still being photographed, but they should be up later this week.

Here’s the link to the master page:

Dye Sample Project

Please spread the word! It was a LOT of work photographing everything, color-correcting the images, and writing/posting the documentation for the samples. I did it because I thought others might find them useful – so please let others know they’re there!

May 22, 2018 by Tien Chiu 18 Comments

Breakthrough

The last two years have been a bit of a puzzle for me. I’ve done virtually no weaving – which is pretty darn odd, considering I quit my job so I could focus on developing my career as a textile artist. At first I thought it was because I was busy doing other things – mostly, working on my business and fulfilling my duties as Board President at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Both of those took (and are still taking) a ton of time and emotional energy. But two years? I was starting to wonder if I’d made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I seemed to have very little interest in weaving. But I couldn’t seem to come up with anything that triggered my enthusiasm.

Then two things happened. The first was getting a close look at Itchiku Kubota’s kimono, which are both beautiful and masterful. Conceiving and executing these kimono requires not only vision, but impressive technical skills and deep understanding of the design possibilities of each technique. Years of technical mastery are needed to make them.

This is very different from how most textile artists currently work. Current textile art emphasizes message; it’s about what you’re saying with your art, not about the skill and precision with which the art is made. In fact, too-good construction can even make your work suspect, because good craftsmanship is associated with craft, not art. (Insert the usual arguments about craft vs. art here.)

As a result, most of the textile art I’ve seen recently, while powerful, has been pretty simple, technically speaking. Most of it could be composed by someone with just a few years of experience, and made within a matter of weeks or months. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that style; it’s a perfectly valid approach to art, and it results in some remarkable pieces. It works for a lot of artists.

But it doesn’t work for me. My natural preference is for work that is intricate; that combines multiple media; that requires technical mastery; and that takes many months or years to complete. But I’ve seen relatively little modern work that fits that description. (Except for the American Tapestry Alliance shows, which I love!)

So when I asked a lot of established artists how to study and develop a career as a textile artist, much of their advice on who and what to study came from a body and philosophy of art totally different from what I loved. And I didn’t see my style of work reflected in any of the textile art I’d seen. Technical virtuosity seemed stuck in a past that emphasized skill over creativity; modern art emphasized creativity and downplayed skill. Who was doing the kind of complex, technical art that I wanted to do? Where was my tribe?

Alice Walker, in her essay “Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” says:

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.

Kubota made my kind of art. Seeing his kimono sent a shock of recognition through me. This is the kind of work I want to do…that intricacy, that breadth of vision, that fusion of multiple disciplines. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! And – having finally found my tribe – I suddenly felt less alone, and a lot more hopeful.

Another thing that has really encouraged me was a discussion I had recently with a museum curator. We were talking about another jacquard artist’s work, and the person I was talking to said, “You know, I think she did herself a disservice when she decided to limit herself to what could be done on a jacquard loom, as opposed to using whatever technique would help her say what she wanted to say.”

I stopped for a moment, thunderstruck. Oh! Duh!

Because, of course, I had fallen into the same trap. It’s a natural mistake: when you buy a very expensive hammer, it’s hard not to feel that you need to pound a LOT of nails to justify your purchase. So, having bought a jacquard loom, I had naturally been envisioning myself as a jacquard weaver – weaving exquisite pieces that exploited the powerful capabilities of the loom. And focusing on weaving to the exclusion of other disciplines.

But I’ve never been terribly excited about handwoven cloth. (Yes, I know that’s a strange confession for a well-known weaver.) To me, cloth is mainly interesting as a raw material for other processes – dyeing and sewing, maybe origami. And flat cloth? It leaves me, well, flat. Since I had been envisioning jacquard-woven flat wall hangings, is it any surprise that I lost my enthusiasm for starting new work?

The last revelation I’ve had has to do with the question of art vs. artistic career. My style of art is quite different from most of what is currently being exhibited and sold. And because I want to put hundreds or thousands of hours into each piece, building a body of work will be really slow. As a result, taking my approach may seriously impact my career as an artist. I have been noodling unhappily over this for the last two years. Kubota’s kimono have knocked me clean off the fence I was sitting on, because if I can make work like those kimono – or even get close – I do not give a flying fuck about whether I ever have an artistic career.

Which, I think, finally qualifies me to call myself an artist. 🙂

There’s a wonderful passage in Richard Bach’s Illusions that describes how I feel. The protagonist (Richard) has been barnstorming around the Midwest, offering people short airplane rides for a small fee. In the process, he meets the Messiah, whose name is Donald Shimoda. Richard decides he wants to be a Messiah too, so he studies with Donald. In this section, Richard has just given his “Sermon on the Mount” teaching to Donald for the umpteenth time:

I looked at him. “Too wordy?”

“As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of your audience unless you learn to keep it short!”

“Well, what’s wrong with losing ninety percent of my audience?” I shot back at him. “What’s wrong with losing ALL my audience? I know what I know and I talk what I talk! And if that’s wrong then that’s just too bad. The airplane rides are three dollars, cash!”

“You know what?” Shimoda stood up, brushing the hay off his blue jeans.

“What?” I said petulantly.

“You just graduated. How does it feel to be a Master?”

“Frustrating as hell.”

He looked at me with an infinitesimal smile. “You get used to it,” he said.

Having thought through all that, I have some very exciting ideas for combining jacquard designs with dyeing. In particular, I want to cross-dye jacquard-woven cloth woven from cotton and polyester threads. Cotton and polyester are ideal for this purpose because dyes for cotton (fiber-reactive dyes) do not dye polyester, and dyes for polyester (disperse dyes) do not dye cotton. So you can weave a pattern in white on white, print on the fabric using fiber-reactive dyes, and then dye it in a different design using disperse dyes. The finished piece will show the cotton in the fiber-reactive pattern and the polyester in the disperse-dye pattern.

This is a bit hard to envision, so here is a sample I made a few years ago while playing with this idea. The warp is Tencel (or maybe cotton), the weft is alpaca, and it’s dyed with both acid and fiber-reactive dyes. The pale blue fiber-reactive dye is applied first (it dyes both cotton and protein fiber), then the thickened red-purple acid dye is stenciled on. The acid dye dyes the alpaca but not the silk, giving an interesting pebbled texture. (You can read more about the process in this blog post.)

This is pretty interesting in itself, but throw in a jacquard loom and some really interesting stuff becomes possible. For example: suppose you weave an image of a tree, where the tree is woven in polyester and the background in cotton or mostly-cotton. You can weave the trunk of the tree in a “bark” pattern that is mostly polyester with some textured cotton ridges going through it, and then paint different colors/designs on the polyester and the cotton parts of the bark. You could weave birds in cotton half-hidden against a canopy of polyester leaves. Then you could stencil a pattern of light and dark green on the polyester leaves without touching the birds, and come back and paint the cotton birds later.

Or you could go abstract and do shibori or tied-resist dyeing (twice!). Or you could try to do woven shibori! Depending on thickness, polyester thread may be strong enough to use as tie threads…and polyester has memory, so there is also the option of permanently-set crimp cloth. The possibilities are truly endless, and well worth exploring. This could be a LOT of fun!

May 4, 2018 by Tien Chiu 21 Comments

Pilgrimage

Most artists find their way into art gradually. Their interest develops over several years, often early in their lives.

I didn’t arrive at art quite so gradually. In fact, I regarded fiber arts as a not-terribly-important hobby until December 1995. Then a friend handed me a copy of Smithsonian Magazine, saying, “I saw this article and thought you’d find it interesting.” I opened it, and was floored by a photo of the most amazing art I’d ever seen. It was a kimono, Burning Sun, by Japanese artist Itchiku Kubota.

At that moment, I knew that what I wanted to do with my life, more than anything else, was to make something as beautiful, powerful, and technically masterful as that kimono. It had never occurred to me that fiber art could be art before – I’d been spinning yarn for sweaters and designing interesting quilt tops, which people thought were artistic. But in my mind, they weren’t art. Kubota’s kimono could stand against the most masterful painters and sculptors. They opened my mind to a whole new world of what could be done with textiles.

Alas, Kubota’s work normally resides in Japan, at the Itchiku Kubota Museum. A trip to Japan was on my bucket list, but it didn’t appear likely to happen anytime soon.

So when I found out the kimono were on exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada, well…

Tien with Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun, at the Textile Museum of Canada — Tien with Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun, at the Textile Museum of Canada

…that’s me, standing next to the artwork that inspired my calling.

It was amazing to see Burning Sun in person. Many artworks don’t live up to their photos when viewed in real life. But Burning Sun’s photos didn’t do it justice – not even close! – because an image of the full piece can’t capture the intricate detail.

For example, here’s an closeup near the bottom of the left sleeve:

Closeup of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Closeup of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

At this distance, you can see some details – stitched-resist (shibori) dyeing, delicate brush painting, and embroidery.

Getting closer, though, you can make out more:

Even closer view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Even closer view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

Now you can see that there are two kinds of embroidery thread – rough silver thread at the middle right, and a smooth, glossy thread at top right. You also get a glimpse of the wonderful textures created by the shibori stitching.

And if you stick your nose right up against the fabric (don’t worry, I didn’t touch it!):

Super close view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Super close view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

Now you can see that the base cloth isn’t plain weave – it’s woven in horizontal ridges punctuated by irregularly placed floats, creating a textured fabric with floating flecks of light.

I spent two days in the exhibit, from opening until closing (though I did take a break for lunch on both days). I took 1,297 photos of the 40 kimono – though I wish I’d taken a few more, since I’ve found some gaps already. The first day I ran madly about documenting/photographing EVERYTHING, because I wanted detailed shots I could study later. Near the end of the second day, I had a few hours left, so I spent some time just looking at, and absorbing, the artistry in the kimono.

I would really have liked a third day (or another three weeks, months, years…), but two was enough to get most of what I needed. Kubota’s work is inspirational to me in so many ways – the sweeping vision, the incredible technical mastery (across multiple disciplines!), the integration of conceptually different design elements (physical texture, flat areas of ink drawing, shibori dyeing), and the ability to design at multiple scales, from the sweeping vista to tiny stitches. It is ambitious, masterful, and complex. I have never seen anything like it.

Here are some hopefully illustrative photos.

This first photo is of five kimono from the “Symphony of Light” – envisioned as a set of 80+ kimono depicting the seasons of Mt. Fuji and then expanding into the universe. (Kubota only finished about half of the Symphony before he died.)

6 kimono from Itchiku Kubota's "Symphony of Light" — 6 kimono from Itchiku Kubota’s “Symphony of Light”

As you can see, when lined up next to each other, the kimono form a single sweeping image.

In fact, this set of six kimono is actually part of a much larger set, that all merge into a single image. Here is a panorama with 13 kimono (you’ll have to click in to see the larger version; it’s hard to make out details if you don’t). You can see how the seasons merge into one another, late summer to fall to early winter.

13 kimono in Itchiku Kubota's "Symphony of Light" — 13 kimono in Itchiku Kubota’s “Symphony of Light”

I believe that all the kimono of the Symphony of Light can be lined up in this way. What a breathtaking vision!

But wait! That’s not all! Each kimono also stands alone. Let’s look at just one kimono – Hin (Nostalgia). It’s the fifth one from the right:

Itchiku Kubota's kimono "Hin (Nostalgia)" — Itchiku Kubota’s kimono “Hin (Nostalgia)”

While it was designed as part of a larger set, it also forms a complete composition when viewed by itself.

But look a little closer. See that boring-looking dark brown section in the bottom right corner of the left sleeve, just above the “cloud” at the bottom? This is what it looks like from a foot away:

closeup, left sleeve, Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — closeup, left sleeve, Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

Wow! That boring brown spot is really interesting! The variety of textures is amazing – the smoothness of the “fog” drifting through the bottom, and the longer, sharper creases traveling in different directions on the right side, to give motion to the misty tendrils. The trees are composed of delicate ink painting in the center of each brown area, outlining the trunk, and horizontal ridges suggesting branches. (And if you look to the left, in the medium brown area, you’ll see some very light brush painting suggesting more trees hidden in mist.)

Further up the sleeve, there’s another great set of textures:

top left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — top left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

I love this particular section because it’s almost all texture – but texture used in a deliberate and astoundingly precise manner to create movement, depth, and patterning. There are four textures just in this small section! And the textures are coordinated with subtle dyework to create the impression of layers of mist shifting over the mountain.

What blows my mind isn’t just the technical excellence of the work but the multidimensional expertise needed to envision it. Each of the design components Kubota is using – texture, color, line – is created using a different kind of surface design technique. Each of those methods “thinks” differently. It’s hard enough to design using even one of those three methods, which is why most textile artists work inside a single branch of surface design. But here Kubota is integrating three very different methods in a single piece, combining them into something far more powerful.

Here’s a shot from near the bottom of the kimono that shows a similar combination of techniques:

bottom of Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — bottom of Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

Here the shibori ridges create earth and tree branches. To get crisp definition in the tree trunks – not achievable with shibori – Kubota uses ink pen. And, because neither of those techniques produces luster or luminescence, Kubota’s decided to embroider the tops of the trees with scattered stitches in smooth, lustrous gold thread. This gives the effect of sunlight glinting off the treetops.

Kubota’s work has had a profound impact on me because he worked the way I want to work, and his work shatters a lot of the constraints that were suggested to me as a budding artist. For example, I was advised to pick three or four techniques to work with, in a single medium. The idea is to achieve greater mastery by exploring one area deeply rather than trying to integrate a lot of unrelated methods. Kubota works with just a few techniques, but drawn from vastly different areas of surface design. It’s inspiring to me to see that this can work – because my natural inclination is to work across multiple disciplines. Trying to focus in a single area felt terribly limiting.

I’m still processing all my thoughts and feelings about the exhibit. Seeing Kubota’s work has helped me recognize some of the limitations I’d imposed on myself, and reassured me that there is enormous potential in my multidisciplinary approach. The design philosophy embodied in his kimono is making me think deeply about what it means to me to be an artist, what I want to strive for in my work, and what I want to learn. And, of course, I’m also learning a ton about design by examining the work of a master.

Kubota’s work is also making me feel enthusiastic about weaving again, which is great after a nearly two-year hiatus. I was seriously wondering whether I had made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I felt like I might be done with weaving. But seeing his work has made me think of some really cool stuff I could weave (and dye) – and I can’t wait to get started on it!

Over the next couple weeks, I’m planning to write a series of blog posts about some of the thoughts the kimono have inspired – both philosophy and design. Stay tuned!

March 3, 2018 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Delightfully thorny puzzles

I’ve been hard at work designing Everett’s stole. It’s proving to be a seriously difficult problem. Which is not a bad thing – I love complicated puzzles – but I also need to get this one done!

I finished weaving the samples a short while ago. Here’s what they looked like on the loom:

samples for Everett's stole — samples for Everett’s stole

The structure is double weave. The black warp is on top and is doing all the interesting stuff; the white warp is on the bottom, and its main function is to stabilize whatever wefts aren’t being used on the top layer.

And here’s what that sample piece looked like when done:

This 15-inch sample took 8-9 hours to weave, because the density of the weft threads is insane. There are 253 picks per inch! (By way of comparison, a medium-weight handwoven fabric is usually about 20-30 picks per inch, so – scientists take note! – this cloth has a thread count that is a full order of magnitude higher.) The sample is also woven with four different colors of weft, which means weaving with four shuttles. That’s much slower than weaving with a single shuttle. Even though I’m an extraordinarily fast weaver, I can only weave about two inches of this cloth per hour. Which means that the five feet of fabric I’ll need for the stole should take about 30 hours to weave.

(Just for fun, I once timed myself weaving a warp of the same width, but in a medium-weight weaving yarn (10/2 cotton, about 3x the weight of sewing thread). I can weave 2.6 yards of that medium-weight plain weave fabric per hour, so in the time needed to weave five feet of fabric for the stole, I could crank out two hundred thirty-four feet(!) of the simpler fabric.)

But wait! It gets better. One of my discoveries from this sample is that four weft colors is not enough; I’m going to need five. That will mean (a) increasing the thread density to 300 picks (weft threads) per inch, and (b) using five shuttles, which will further slow my weaving speed. So I expect progress to slow to about 1.5 inches per hour, or 40 hours to weave five feet of cloth. (During which I could weave 104 yards of medium-weight fabric – enough to get you the entire length of a football field and into the end zone for a touchdown!)

But that’s the easy part. I don’t mind spending a lot of time weaving; I enjoy the process, and it’s fun to watch the cloth develop. The design challenges are what’s got me banging my head against the wall.

Let me explain. (It’s complicated, so bear with me.)

Jacquard weaving is basically “paint by numbers,” only with weave structures. (Weave structures are the pattern in which the threads interlace to form cloth.) To design my jacquard pieces, I start with an image, and I reduce it to a limited color palette. Then I move the image into Arahweave, my jacquard design software, and I assign each color a weave structure. Then Arahweave takes the image and replaces each pixel of a color with a unit of its assigned weave structure. It’s a little like doing counted cross stitch – each color/symbol indicates a different structure.

The image I feed Arahweave doesn’t have to look like the design drawing. Here’s the design sketch for Bipolar Prison:

Sketch for handwoven art about bipolar disorder, "Bipolar Prison" — Sketch for “Bipolar Prison”

Here’s the image I put into the weaving software:

"Bipolar Prison" - prepared for Arahweave — “Bipolar Prison” – prepared for Arahweave

And here’s the finished piece:

The purpose of the middle image – the one I fed into the weaving software – is just to specify which weave structure appears in what area. I deliberately chose colors that were easy to tell apart.

If you want to reproduce an image precisely, though, there are a few more steps. Step 1 is to weave samples of every weave structure you’re thinking of using, with every color you plan to use it with. The number of samples depends on the complexity of the image. For this stole, I wove about 240 samples, most of which are shown at the start of this post.

Step 2 is to photograph the samples, being careful to get an accurate representation of the color.

Step 3 is to take the photos into Photoshop, average the image of each sample into a single color, and create a palette consisting of the sample colors.

In Step 4, you tell Photoshop to “translate” your design sketch into an image that contains only the colors available in your palette of samples.

In theory, this should be easy. And some projects actually are that simple. My piece Goodbye, Ma! was quite straightforward. Here’s the design sketch:

Here’s an enlarged view of the image with reduced palette:

You can see how the pixels blend into something very like the original, even though the palette is very limited.

Unfortunately, Photoshop’s color substitutions don’t always work for jacquard weaving. When substituting, it will tend to choose colors that are close in value (darkness) rather than colors of the same hue (color family, e.g. red, green, blue, etc.). So if it’s looking for a color that is “similar to” forest green, it may well pick brick red rather than medium green, because the brick red is about the same darkness as the original color. This more or less works for photos because the pixels are tiny, so the eye blends everything together. Weaving happens at a much larger scale, so the colors don’t average as much. A dot of brick red in a sea of medium green is pretty obvious.

It’s actually worse than that. In weaving, your colors are limited to mixtures of warp colors and weft colors. So the medium green is is actually dots of bright green weft mixed with dots of black warp, which averages out to medium green. The brick red is actually dots of bright red weft mixed with dots of black warp, averaging to bright red. But since the dots are relatively large, the eye picks out the bright red dots in the sea of green, and says, “Hey, what’s up with that?”

I had the same problem with Bipolar Prison, which contained a lot of similar colors. To keep Photoshop from getting confused, I had to separate the design sketch into four parts: the face, the red bar, the blue bar, and the background. I reduced each component to the right set of colors for that component, then reassembled them into a single file.

Everett’s Stole has the same issues, with an additional complication: It contains a lot of colors. Too many to do with a single set of wefts, unless I want to weave with 11 shuttles. Even I am not that much of a masochist – and it would create other problems.

So to get the many colors I need, I plan to use different weft colors in different sections.

Since it’s been awhile since I last mentioned it, let me describe the project.

My friend Everett is in seminary, and commissioned me to weave him something special for his eventual ordination as a Unitarian minister. At his request, I sketched out a lake at sunset, using a design that could be divided in half, each half running down one side of the stole. When worn, it will look like this:

Everett's stole (as worn) — Everett’s stole (as worn)

My plan is to weave both halves at once, separated by an inch or two of cloth in the center, and with an inch or two of seam allowance at either selvage. This ensures that the halves will match perfectly.

Here is the sketch for the two halves put together. The thin red line down the middle shows where the cloth will be divided in half to make the stole. Just before weaving, I’ll move the two halves apart in Photoshop and add enough cloth between them to create the seam allowances.

Everett's stole - design sketch — Everett’s stole – design sketch

This design contains a ton of colors – more than I could get by mixing four or five wefts + black. So my plan is to use different weft colors in each section of the stole. Here’s my initial plan, showing the colors I planned to use in each section:

Everett's stole, design analysis — Everett’s stole, design analysis

This approach breaks the stole into five sections, each with a different set of weft colors:

The bottom of the lake: Silver, indigo, forest green, teal
The middle of the lake: Indigo, teal, medium green, forest green
The line between the sunset and the lake: Gold, orange, lavender, forest green
The sunset just above the lake: Gold, orange, lavender, indigo
The night sky: Silver, indigo (I added navy blue and deep purple later)

Unfortunately, breaking up an image into sections creates problems wherever the sections meet. Let’s suppose that you are using orange in one section but not the next. If orange appears in the image right up to the boundary between sections, there will be an abrupt and highly visible line where the orange disappears. Similarly, the orange needs to appear gradually, or there will be a harsh line at the bottom of the section.

So in addition to dealing with Photoshop’s conversion problems, I need to figure out how to phase colors in and out at the section boundaries. Unless I discover a handy Photoshop trick, I’m pretty sure this means a lot of tedious hand-painting.

Nonetheless, I’m enjoying this project. I’m enjoying it precisely because it is difficult. I love projects that are so hard that I don’t know if they’re possible. I love projects that require me to invent new methods and stretch the boundaries of what I already know. I love a good challenge, and this one is one I can really sink my teeth into.

I have a deadline on this project, so I’m probably going to focus mostly on it for a few weeks. Minus the time spent on tomato planting, of course. That project has also gotten a little (um, well, actually a lot) out of hand, but this blog post is already insanely long, so I’ll write about it on a different day.

I will, however, leave you with a photo of the two most gorgeously wonderful cats in the world (I bet you can guess who that is!) I’m pretty sure they were hunting birds. Or trying to.

Fritz and Tigress hunting imaginary birds

February 9, 2018 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

A new weaving podcast!!

It’s been seven long years since Syne Mitchell recorded the last episode of Weavecast. Seven years in which the weaving world had no podcasts whatsoever.

I am delighted to say that that has changed! Sarah Resnick of GIST Yarn has started producing a new podcast for weavers, titled quite logically Weave: A Podcast. She launched earlier this week, kicking off the podcast with THREE episodes! I’ve already listened to episode #1, an interview with off-loom roving weaver Meghan Shimek, and found it both fascinating and well-produced.

And I’m honored to have been featured in the third podcast!

It’s also available on iTunes and wherever else great podcasts are found…so check it out!