textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

March 28, 2020 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Inside out, upside down – new inspiration?

The world has changed.

I haven’t written anything for the last month and a half – first because I was too busy with business things, then because somehow everything I was working on seemed irrelevant with the entire world coming apart at the seams. But I feel I should catch you up on where I am!

I wove some more samples on the tiger project, but overall I found it very frustrating. I’m having technical problems with the warp – the leftmost four inches on one warp beam are coming out significantly looser than the rest of the warp, and evening out tension between the two warp beams is proving to be a devil of a challenge. I’ve been in touch with Tronrud Engineering about it and it looks like it may be a bug in the software; they’re working on it, but with everything shut down it may be awhile. They did suggest a workaround, but it won’t work for my particular situation.

Meanwhile, I’ve tried several weft combinations for the tiger and have not been satisfied with any of them. At this point, I’ve basically decided to remove the current warp and replace it with a new one, something that will be less frustrating to work with. It will need to be 2,640 threads and sett at 90 epi, because that’s how the loom is threaded and rethreading would be an unimaginable task (OMG never again – that’s what I bribed Ricki for!). And after all that black, I’m craving COLOR!

So I have been surfing the web looking for inspiration. I’ve decided I want to work with painted warps – more specifically, a double weave warp with two painted warps in different colorways. At the moment, I’m thinking fuchsia and forest green for one warp, and indigo and cerulean blue for the other. Kinda like in these two tie-dyed shirts:

indigo and forest green/fuchsia tie-dyed shirts

The photos aren’t quite true to color, but you get the idea. The warps wouldn’t be painted in nice neat linear fashion, but coiled up randomly and dye sprinkled and scrunched on until the warp was thoroughly soaked. There would be a lot of blending of colors, so the warp wouldn’t be “pure” fuschia or “pure” green in most areas but a blend between the two.

I also plan to use different fibers – probably silk, mercerized cotton, and unmercerized cotton – so the threads absorb the dyes differently. The result should be something similar to what I got for my piece Bipolar Prison:

Bipolar Prison was woven with three different fibers: two strands of mercerized 16/2 cotton, one strand of 20/2 silk, and one strand of 10/2 unmercerized cotton. The warp was coiled up randomly and then sprinkled randomly with dye. One warp was dyed in yellow/orange/red and the other in blue/green/purple. The fibers absorbed the dyes differently, producing a mottled effect even in areas where all the fibers got the exact same dyes. I really like the effect.

In Bipolar Prison, I used analogous colors so the color blends would remain bright. In this new warp, I’d deliberately blend the complementary colors magenta and green – color-wheel opposites – to create a range of dull colors in between. I find that blending complementary colors generally creates a far more interesting color range than blending colors that are close together on the color wheel.

Of course there are a ton of design decisions to be made above and beyond warp colors. There are a million things I could do with patterning – the patterning of which warp is on top, the pattern of how that warp interlaces with the weft, the color of the weft. I could knit a blank and make the weft change color, too. Oooo! (she squeals, delighted) But first things first. First you decide on the project, and figure out the warp. Designing the rest of that can come later.

I haven’t yet decided what to make in this new project. I’m still auditioning ideas. But for the first time in years, the idea of making clothing sounds appealing. I thought I’d sworn off clothing forever – but maybe not. Tomorrow I’ll go looking for fashion inspiration. I’m thinking a dress or a coat. Time to go surf the web for fashion porn. 🙂

February 15, 2020 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Tigers and textures

I’m now on to considering my next piece. I want to play with textures, and am considering a tiger in matelassé – with brushed silk/mohair or silk chenille in the furry parts. Sensuous? Absolutely! I want to make a piece that just begs to be touched.

I’m half-thinking of entering it for Complexity – half-thinking because the deadline is 28 days away and there is only a sliver of a chance that I’ll actually finish the piece within 28 days, plus I really don’t enjoy rushing through the design process, plus Complexity has a rule against publishing the finished piece anywhere (including social media and, of course, this blog) prior to Complexity that I think is just plain stupid.

I suppose the idea is to give the show exclusivity – “If you want to see this piece you must come to the show!” – but frankly, free publicity is a lot more useful in getting people to a show. (Speaking as someone who spent two years as Board President at a textiles museum – and is currently Board VP there – we’d be delighted if people shared pieces from our upcoming shows with “Come see this at the upcoming show at the Museum!” Obscurity is a much bigger threat than people having seen a piece online.)

But, since half the fun of creating a piece is sharing the process and the finished piece with you-all, not being able to show the piece on my blog until four months later takes half the fun out of making it in the first place. So, considering whether to push the deadline, and considering whether I want to enter even if I do make the deadline. Grumble.

Anyway, off my soapbox.

For this next piece, I want to play with textures, because that’s what the Complex Weavers Designing Fabrics Study Group, to which I belong, is studying this year. You may recall that, a few blog posts ago, I was considering a horse in matelassé, which is a double weave structure with a thick, fluffy weft passing between the layers. The layers are stitched together in some areas and not in others, producing a puffy effect in areas where the layers are not stitched together and a flattened look in the areas where the layers are stitched together.

Like this:

I’ve since ditched the idea of the horse, and am now considering doing a tiger, with either a brushed silk/mohair weft or a silk chenille weft, using this tiger drawing from iStockPhoto (original drawing by daikokeubisu, modified by me):

The background would be a pebbly, black-and-white crepe or granite weave (mostly white) in cotton and silk, flat. The rocks would be black, puffed areas, black cotton (smooth cloth). The orange and white areas of the tiger would be woven in shaded satins with either silk chenille or brushed silk/kid mohair yarn (dyed rusty orange or left white), and be puffy matelasse. The black parts of the tiger would be kept flat, and probably be woven with smooth yarns to keep the textural contrast as high as possible. I think if I use a furry yarn for the black stripes I would lose the 3D effect of the matelassé.

It’s possible I could complete this in 28 days – the design is not challenging, it’s mostly technically complicated. This would be a three-and-a-half layer weave – two layers of fabric to weave the image, plus a third layer for the matelassé backing, plus a fourth “layer” for the stuffing weft, which passes between the layers without interacting with them but needs to be accounted for in the treadling. However, the Arahweave design software makes this kind of design (relatively) easy, so I could conceivably do the design fairly quickly.

Of course, I’d also have to do samples, dye the yarn, and weave the piece using five shuttles. (Black smooth weft, white smooth weft, orange furry weft, white furry weft, puffy stuffing weft.) So, we’ll see.

January 31, 2020 by Tien Chiu 8 Comments

Seasons of Creativity

I am pleased to present, at last: Seasons of Creativity!

It’s hard to make out many details in a photo that small (the actual piece is 28″ x 63″), so I suggest clicking on the small photo to get the full-resolution photo, then zooming in.

Also, here are a few closeups:

And here’s a close-up of some of the butterflies near the end:

The photos, alas, do not really capture the piece. There are subtle color changes in the background, which has speckles of deep coffee brown, then burgundy, eggplant, navy, and finally black, plus glittering rainbow flecks of whatever wefts aren’t weaving on the surface. There is golden glitter in the background on the far left, beneath the brilliant yellow leaves, and there is silver glitter in the background on the far right, beneath the iridescent and sparkly butterflies. None of this, unfortunately, is captured by the camera, though you can get a few glimmers in the close-up.

So…come to Convergence to see it! It will be there, one way or another – if it doesn’t get into the mixed-media exhibit, I’ll bring it as my piece for the teachers’ exhibit.

The official photo shoot is this weekend, and hopefully I’ll have better photos to offer after that. I’ll swap them into this blog post once they’re ready.

Meanwhile, enjoy a few time-lapse photos of the frenzied two weeks I spent weaving Seasons of Creativity (there’s a reason I wasn’t posting anything!):

70 quills of weft for Seasons of Creativity — All 2.66 miles of weft yarns for Seasons of Creativity. Four hand-painted wefts, each created from multiple strands of superfine yarns, took over 30 hours to prepare before weaving even started!

The first few inches of weaving. I used five shuttles through most of the piece, which took about 20 hours to weave.

leaf section of Seasons of Creativity, on the loom — Deep into the leaves. I took a new photo every time I had to reload the shuttles with a new set of quills – about every 5 inches.

Weaving the last few leaves of Seasons of Creativity — It was surprisingly depressing to weave the last few leaves of Seasons of Creativity and descend into darkness, even though I knew that the stars and butterflies were coming up soon.

Starting to weave the stars in Seasons of Creativity — The beginning of the stars, and the ascent into light and freedom.

Weaving the butterflies in Seasons of Creativity — The butterflies starting to burst forth. The first few butterflies were all green or yellow-green, and I nearly panicked when I saw that the next quill of weft was also slated to be yellow-green. I quickly swapped it out with yellow-orange to give more color variety, and all was well.

Near-final butterflies for Seasons of Creativity — Here the butterflies are getting larger, and I’m preparing to launch into the last set of butterflies. I was weaving like a maniac at this point because my friend Carla was visiting from the East Coast and I wanted to finish in time to show the piece to her!

And, of course, as soon as I finished, I pulled the piece off the loom and spread it out on the bed to take a snapshot to share with you. Which led, inevitably, to this photo:

Because every photo is better with a cat!

So apologies for the lengthy hiatus – I had to wait until I could hang it in a ~~cat-free~~ cat-deprived environment to shoot a photo, and those are hard to come by around here! But I hope it was worth the wait.

January 12, 2020 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

More samples for Seasons of Creativity

I’ve been working like crazy on Seasons of Creativity – so crazy, in fact, that I haven’t had time to post. The deadline is now just 3.5 weeks away, and I’m just starting to weave the next set of samples. Whew! It’s going to be close. But I’m pretty sure I can do it.

Here’s the one-photo summary of what’s happened to date:

Seasons of Creativity - second sample progress photo (wound quills, samples, shuttles) — Seasons of Creativity – second sample set

Top left: one of the four sets of laboriously painted wefts. These were knitted into blanks of precisely calculated length, hand-painted in a meticulously chosen set of dye colors, carefully unraveled onto quills, and labeled with the correct ordering. Top right is the four shuttles, each labeled with the number of the weft and the quill that ought to go into it, so I don’t accidentally weave out of order. (There are actually five shuttles, but the fifth shuttle doesn’t have a painted weft and I couldn’t fit it into the photo, so I left it out.)

Bottom, of course, is the samples I’ve been weaving. Here I’ve been working on the leaves. I’m testing a number of things simultaneously: the number of picks per inch, the imagery, and the leaf and background colors. I’d prefer to be able to test all these things separately and in more detail, but I don’t have time, so I’m kind of experimenting with everything at once.

Here are some of the concerns I’m grappling with.

First, I’m in uncharted territory, dye-wise. I have 1500 dye samples, which are sort of useful in telling me generally what color I’ll get if I mix Color X with Color Y. However, they aren’t useful in telling me what concentration of dye I need to get a particular shade, because the dye samples were done in an immersion dyebath and I am painting on dyes. Unfortunately, concentration of dye is critical information – it’s the difference between pale gray and black, the difference between spring green and forest green. So I’m having to “wing it” based on my experience and looking at the dye in the bucket as I’m mixing it, both of which are pretty unreliable. I’m having to settle for keeping meticulous records so I know what to change next time. It’s making me very nervous about whether I can get it right the second time.

Second, I won’t have time to do a third set of samples to refine the color contrast of the background against the leaves and butterflies. So far I like what I’m seeing in the samples, but I’d really like to weave the whole piece, evaluate what I see, and then make adjustments and weave a second piece that will be better. I’m not going to have time to do that, unfortunately. So I will have to do the best I can on the first try. I think it will come out pretty good, but I’d feel better with enough time to do a revision. C’est la vie.

Having said all that…the second sample is GORGEOUS. Here’s a closeup:

close-up photo of the second sample for Seasons of Creativity

The small photo really doesn’t do the sample justice, though. Actually, neither does the larger photo. The background is rich brown-black flecked with purple-brown and metallic gold, the yellow-green leaves have just a touch of iridescent/metallic glitter, the brown leaves are a mix of reeled silk and mercerized cotton and so have some nice glossy sheen. The photo doesn’t pick up the glitter at all. It’s gorgeous in person.

Here’s a photo of the two samples together:

photo of both samples of Seasons of Creativity — both samples for Seasons of Creativity

One of the things I’m trying to decide is whether to weave Seasons of Creativity with a painted-weft background that changes colors or with a black background. The stark black background on the far left for the butterflies doesn’t appeal to me, but the one on the far right (slightly sparkly with a metallic silver weft) does. The rich brown-black background for the leaves in the top of the photo looks beautiful in person but washes out the leaves in photos (which is important when submitting for juried shows). Similarly, the blue-weft section (second from the left in the photo) in the butterflies looks beautiful, but I think it distracts from the butterflies.

At this point I am thinking I will stick with the colored backgrounds, but I may weave a section of leaves with a black background just to see which I like better. I wish I had time to explore more options!

Now, some technical explanations, since someone asked how knitted blanks work. I unfortunately didn’t take photos (and honestly don’t have time to explain) to show all the details of how knitted blanks work, down to the knitting machine, but the basic ideas is that you knit a long rectangle of fabric, then dye it, then unravel it again to use in weaving (or knitting, or whatever you want). This allows you to use fancy dye techniques while keeping the yarn orderly.

I knitted the blanks on a standard-bed knitting machine, a Brother KH-830. This is a fancy machine that will take punch-card patterns to do all sorts of fancy patterns, but all I’m using it for is stockinette stitch, so a simpler machine would work just as well. The yarn is a collection of various very fine yarns that together work out somewhere around 20/2 cotton in weight.

I knitted some short blanks, wove some samples, and calculated exactly how many stitches are required for a row that is precisely equal in length to one pick of weft. In this case, it’s 84 needles at a stitch size of 1. This calculation isn’t strictly necessary, but it does make things easier later.

I then knitted a set of blanks, one set for each painted weft, at stitch size 1. To help keep track of where I was in the blank (for dyeing purposes), I added two marker rows at stitch size 7 every 50 rows (the machine counts rows for me), and every 100 rows I added a stripe of waste yarn because I planned to start a new quill (bobbin) every 100 picks. This would help me keep the colors in sync – every 100 picks I discard all remaining yarn on all four quills and start fresh with new ones. So any length differences wouldn’t accumulate and cause problems. Since 100 picks’ worth of yarn is about all I can fit on the teeny-tiny quills that I can fit into the Swedish shuttles that go through the small shed on my loom, this works perfectly.

So the blank looks like this:

a section of knitted blank for Seasons of Creativity

The irregularity in the center (the area of larger stitches) is the marker rows, and the black areas are the waste yarn that I put in every 100 stitches. This blank has already been painted, of course.

Most of the blanks consist of multiple yarns knitted together. Some are all silk, but some are a combination of silk and cotton. That was an experiment – I expected the yarns to take up the dye differently, and in fact they did:

knitted blank with different dye take-up between silk and cotton

The difference looks pretty shocking, but I can’t wait to see how it weaves up – I think it will result in some very interesting-looking leaves. The colors will even out a lot through optical mixing when woven, so the result will be a textured single color.

Here is a photo of all the blanks before unraveling:

It took nearly 8 hours to unravel them all. (Would have been faster if I hadn’t had to sneak around the feline bosses. Good thing they nap all afternoon!)

I can’t believe I didn’t take photos of the wound quills! I’ve already used two of them but I’m going to take photos of the rest as soon as I finish this post. I need them for my records, but I’ll also post them here.

The good news about my sample is that it’s weaving up at 120 picks (threads) per inch, not 160-200 as I had originally guessed. That’s a relief! It means Seasons of Creativity will be only about 6000 picks long, which is much more manageable than the 10-12,000 I had been anticipating. I can weave that in about 15 hours. I might have time for that second try after all.

Off to weave more samples!

January 3, 2020 by Tien Chiu 6 Comments

Hey babe…Wanna see MY samples??

I have often remarked (from a straight girl’s perspective) that it’s really too bad that weavers are 99% female, because if you’re going to buy an expensive sports loom, you should at least be able to attract nubile young men with them. And I feel that the first samples for Seasons of Creativity would make anyone swoon:

Samples for Seasons of Creativity — First set of samples for Seasons of Creativity

closeup of samples from Seasons of Creativity — Closeup of butterflies

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first step, of course, was to dye all the blanks. Here are the blanks once I got through painting on dyes:

first set of knitted blanks — first set of blanks

the rest of the dyed knitted blanks — the rest of the blanks

I was a little worried that the dyes might not set well, given that it was cold out, but apparently Procion MX dyes don’t think a California winter (55-60 F) is cold at all – they set just fine with a couple hours in the afternoon sun.

Next, I unraveled the blanks. This should have been easy, except that my boss was breathing down my neck the entire time. Two bosses, in fact. Especially once it was suspected that String might be involved:

trying to wind yarn with two cats supervising — working under strict feline supervision

After I convinced both bosses that getting whiskers and paws caught in moving yarn would be a Bad Idea, Tigress decided to help by weighing down my knitted-blank samples. They might have blown away otherwise in the hurricane winds generated by the bobbin winder. Or been stolen by gremlins. Very thoughtful of her.

After winding the bobbins, I flung myself onto the loom for a four-hour weaving binge. It’s great to be back to weaving! A 3-4 year hiatus is way too long.

first set of samples, woven but still on the loom. — first set of samples woven!

Okay, so what conclusions have I drawn from the samples, and where to go from here?

First, I’ve concluded that I like and will use pretty much all the weft combinations. I was using four different weft yarns: a very fine reeled silk, a fine silk with a metallic strand twisted in, a fine metallic sparkle yarn, and iridescent sewing thread. I bundled those threads together in groups of three and used them as a single weft yarn. All of those combinations worked and looked good, so I’ll use them in the final piece, just in different places. The less sparkly butterflies will go at the beginning, when creativity is just starting to develop, the brilliantly sparkly butterflies will go later on, when creativity is in full swing.

Second, I need to simplify the shading in the butterflies. The Photoshop file has complex and subtle shading. It doesn’t translate well to woven cloth because the motifs aren’t large enough. I think I’m going to change it from seven layers of shading to simple black and white and see if that makes the butterflies look more detailed, rather than blobby masses.

Third, I want to paint the background weft as well, to make it change colors. I really like the blue stripe in the background, and want to use it with a silver or gold sparkly strand to brighten up the butterflies in the far right of the piece, where creativity is in full flower.

In case you’ve forgotten, Seasons of Creativity looks like this:

Seasons of Creativity sketch — Sketch of Seasons of Creativity

I’d like to make the background shade from hints of chocolate brown with gold sparkle on the right, to flat, dull charcoal gray in the center, to deep purple (?) with very subtle metallic glitter in the center right, to hints of royal blue with sparkly silver or gold metallic glitter in the far right. Subtle – the background will be 87% black mixed with those colors – but providing a hint of color. I’m still considering what weft yarn to use, but I’m thinking 20/2 cotton with a strand of sparkle thread.

So what are my next steps?

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, Seasons of Creativity has gotten kind of complicated. Actually very complicated, technically speaking. We’re now talking seven different weft yarns, five or six combinations of weft yarns, four knitted blanks, and a bazillion color changes (and a partridge in a pear tree!). I’ve thought this through and have concluded that this is pretty much impossible to sample without simply weaving the piece and seeing what happens. The question is whether to weave a full-sized “first draft” piece, make corrections, and then weave a second draft, or whether to weave a half-size piece for testing purposes and then weave the full-sized piece.

Both approaches have merits – the half-sized piece would of course take only half as long to dye/weave, and I might be able to create files to test everything I need to test within the context of the half-sized piece. But I would have to recalculate all my numbers, which would lose some of the saved time and introduce more room for error. At this point I’m inclined to weave a full-sized “first draft” and see what happens. This is a non-trivial commitment, though, since Seasons of Creativity is about 12,000 picks long. I timed myself weaving the sample, and I’m currently weaving at about 500 picks per hour. So the weaving time alone on the first draft would be 24 hours. Plus time knitting and dyeing the blanks. Figure about 50 hours for the first-draft version. This is decidedly nontrivial. I will think about this for at least a day, and probably weave some more preparatory samples, before deciding anything. I think the best plan may be to prepare and plan as well as possible beforehand, give it my best shot, and simply reserve time to weave a second piece if the “first draft” doesn’t meet my expectations.

More to mull on…stay tuned!