textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

September 26, 2020 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

New studio!

The Great Studio Move is complete! I spent two weeks schlepping stuff into the 8′ x 16′ storage container, which was completely full when I finished. Then I spent a week obsessively moving, sorting, and rearranging things in the garage. I got rid of a LOT of stuff. Gave away, donated, threw out – probably about three cubic yards of stuff, or about half a small dump truck full. I eliminated two whole shelving units’ worth of stuff!

I don’t have a “before” pic (frankly, it was too much of a cluttered pigsty to show to my best friend, let along anyone else), but here’s a pic from just before the insulation installers arrived. Grace is on the left, Maryam on the right.

Here’s the studio now, completely reorganized, seen with the big garage door open:

view of studio from the front of the garage — studio, viewed from front of garage

I’m still decluttering a bit; the stuff in the foreground will be going away soon.

Here’s the studio viewed from the side door:

A view of the studio from the side door. Maryam and Grace, my two looms, are facing each other. — studio, viewed from the side door

The studio looks pretty industrial, but that’s kind of inevitable when it’s in a garage with unfinished (but insulated!) walls, and sharing space with a home gym. At least black rubber mats are covering the concrete floor! It makes it much more comfortable to walk/stand on, and protects the floor against dropped dumbbells when weightlifting.

(Someone asked how many weasels I can lift now. Alas, I can’t do squats right now because we don’t have a squat rack at home, but we do have an Olympic barbell, and I’m pleased to say that despite COVID I can still deadlift 900 weasels! (That’s 225 pounds, for you non-weaselly folks.) That means I can go around picking up guys – that is, if they aren’t too heavy and are willing to lie around on the floor in a convenient position for deadlifting. (Hey, you gotta start somewhere. 😉 ))

As you can see, I turned Maryam around so she and Grace are now facing each other. I figure that way they can chat while I’m not around. 🙂

If you’re wondering what the gray thing on the floor in front of Maryam (left-hand loom) is, it’s a Topo Mat by ergodriven. It’s the best ergonomic floor mat I’ve ever encountered, and if you’ve got a standing desk, you should run, not walk, to your keyboard and order one immediately.

The funny knobs and things are designed to give you lots of different surfaces/angles to stand on to encourage you to shift your weight about as you stand. With it, I can comfortably stand all day long (barefoot!) at my standing desk, or (in this case) weave all day long standing at Grace or Maryam. No more back problems for me!

The one downside to the Topo mats is that they are very comfortable. Very, very comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that Someone has taken to napping on them:

Tigress sitting on my Topo ergonomic floor mat — My human thought she was clever, getting rid of the chair…Ha! Just because you don’t *have* a chair doesn’t mean I can’t still steal your chair.

Curses! Foiled again. And here I thought leaving the old chair around to sit on would keep the Queen and Mistress of the Universe satisfied. Tigress is far too clever a cat to fall for that trick, apparently. (Because half the fun is inconveniencing the human.)

Fritz, meanwhile, is not to be outdone. I was doing a photo shoot for the next Weave-Along (which launches in a week or so). I had closed the door to keep the cats out, but – like the Australians building their famous wall to keep out the rabbits – had neglected to notice that there was already a cat in the room. Fritz helpfully pointed this out to me shortly after I started shooting photos, and provided some assistance in setting up the shots. For some reason, the human was singularly unappreciative of his efforts, and he shortly joined Tigress outside the photography “studio”, but I did get a lovely photo of him in the interim:

The garden is going well. I just harvested five pounds of potatoes – about half the potatoes from this variety – and made five pints of intensely flavored Concord grape jam from our Concord grapes. I divided and replanted Egyptian walking onions and garlic. And I’ve harvested quite a few passion fruit this year (unlike the last few years when we got almost none)!

The best news for last: I cleared enough space in the garage to make way for a small treadle loom! Yes, that’s right – despite having two jacquard looms, I want a small treadle loom. There’s something enjoyable and peaceful about having a wooden loom, so a Baby Wolf is on her way to me! She’ll arrive on Monday. Pics, of course, on arrival. 🙂

Finally: I’m still clearing out space. I was trying to sell the tjaps as a single group, but that doesn’t seem to have worked, so I am now offering them individually for $50 each plus shipping (the “going rate” for good quality copper tjaps is $90 or so, and the animal tjaps I have are hard to find). Here are three photos of the groups – if you like one particular tjap and want a closer look, close-up photos of each tjap are in this Google Drive folder.

(Tjaps are copper stamps traditionally used for batik, but they can also be used with paint and lots of other things, or just collected as decorative items. They are beautiful!)

If you’re interested in one or more of them, email me at tien@tienchiu.com. If you want three or more, I’ll cut the price to $40 each – I really want to reclaim the space!

If you’re local, I also have a Bernina 830 Record sewing machine (the mechanical 830, not the electronic one) with lots of extra feet that I’m offering for $600. Pix here and here. I’ll throw in a homemade double-ended electric bobbin winder and a DeLonghi steam iron with separate boiler if you buy it. If no one local wants it I’ll consider shipping (at buyer’s expense).

I’ll conclude this post with an intriguing photo from the garden. Culinary ginger isn’t as showy as its ornamental counterparts, but I think its flowers are quite beautiful nonetheless. This photo is of the pots by the back door:

culinary ginger blossoms — (culinary) ginger flowers!

More on Monday, when the new loom arrives!

June 20, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Whew! What a month!!

I know I’ve been delinquent with the blog updates. I’ll plead that it’s been quite the month! Fortunately, in a very good way.

Janet Dawson and I decided to team up and teach a weave-along about weaving from your stash. We thought we’d get five hundred, maybe a thousand students, tops. Instead, we had over THREE THOUSAND WEAVERS sign up!! We were delighted, but also a wee bit overwhelmed. As a result, we both more or less dropped off the map for about a month.

I did get the sample warp onto the loom and weave the first set of samples for Tourmaline Butterfly. I was doing a rendition of this image:

image of butterfly wing — butterfly wing

The concept is that the cape, when the arms are spread, looks like butterfly wings, with dark green veins coming out from the body of the wearer and ending in the border of dots. The interior of the “wings” portion is intensely colored and shaded out towards the veins to give a dimensional effect.

For the folks who like technical details (if you don’t, just skip to the next paragraph): in all the samples, I used a point threading and a networked rosepath treadling in the pink areas (the tie-up is twill), and a brick-like fancy twill pattern in the green areas. It’s double weave, so the pink is one layer and the green is another layer, stitched together periodically so the fabric comes out as a single layer.

As you can see, the colors are pretty disappointing. I was hoping for some nice hue contrast and a clear, distinct pattern, but there simply wasn’t enough value (light/dark) contrast, and the chunks of color blended into each other even from a relatively short distance, muddying the bright pink into a dull brown.

I sat down and thought about it. I was facing a difficult color dilemma. Green and magenta, the two colors in the bright part of my painted warp, sit opposite each other on the color wheel. That meant that practically any color I chose as weft would blend into a dull color with one or the other of them. The only two exceptions were yellow and turquoise, both of which were strong-minded colors that would shift the colors away from the magenta and green I wanted. And yellow in particular is a super-assertive color that would probably drag attention from the painted warp (yellow is such a diva!).

Nonetheless, I thought I’d give them a shot.

Sample #2 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with yellow, turquoise/blue, and olive green wefts.

None of these were what I wanted – the blue was about the same darkness as the magenta, producing a nearly invisible pattern. The yellow produced a bright result and a clear pattern, but HOO BOY!! took over the entire piece – entirely predictably, and not at all what I wanted.

I thought about it some more and eventually decided that this section was all about magenta, and it would be okay to lose some of the oomph of the green. So I decided to try a dark, dull magenta weft. Using a darker, duller weft is a great way to bring forward the colors in a painted warp (because the eye is more attracted to light, saturated colors), and using a similar color would reinforce the magenta.

This led me to Sample #3:

In the previous samples, I had felt that there wasn’t enough of the painted warp showing due to the shading from the center to the outside of each section (it goes from showing more weft near the outside of each pink section to showing more warp on the inside). So I switched it to showing mostly warp throughout the entire section.

But on seeing it, I decided the sample looked too “flat”. So I wove sample #4, which was Just Right:

Sample #4 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with dark magenta weft and shading towards the edges of each pink section

I like this sample a lot. The darker magenta weft gives it subtle motion without significantly diluting the intensity of the pink areas, and the very subtle shading from dark outside towards lighter inside of each pink area gives it a subtle sense of three-dimensionality. I think for the final piece I will want to make the weft a bit darker, but I will have to weave more samples to be sure.

At the top of the fourth sample is another experiment with a slightly more saturated pink weft. I don’t like that one as much; it looks brighter but not as rich as the one below it. That’s interesting, considering that normally I am a bright-color magpie!

So that’s the Tourmaline Butterfly update.

Meanwhile, other things have been happening!

Jamie and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary! Here we are together, after a wonderful take-out meal from Manresa (three-star Michelin take-out – only in the Bay Area!). Hard to believe we’ve been married for an entire decade, but it’s true.

And yes, 10 years since my handwoven wedding dress really kicked off my weaving career. Hard to believe I had only been weaving 2.5 years when I started it!

And here it is in its home at The Henry Ford museum, being shown to some visitors.

A volunteer there told me that most garments are stored hung for space reasons, but my dress is stored flat in a special, custom-built archival box. I’m glad to hear that they are treating it as precious; I’d like to think it will be preserved for many generations to come.

Finally, the fruit trees Jamie planted seven years ago when we moved in are starting to bear fruit. Lots and lots of fruit. I have been making pie:

Aprium (apricot-plum cross) pie with chocolate ice cream

And, of course, the first tomatoes are ripening. An eager-beaver Sungold.

Sungold tomato - first of the season! — First tomato of the season!

Finally, since no blog post would be complete without a cat, here is Tigress, Queen of the Laundry Pile. Because laundry is not truly clean until it has been liberally bestowed with cat hair.

Whew! What a post. But there was SO much to catch you up on!

May 10, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Tourmaline Butterfly (?)

After taking in quite a few suggestions, both here and in the Color in Weaving Facebook group, I’ve settled on a possible working title: Tourmaline Butterfly. The colors in the warp remind me of one of my favorite stones, watermelon tourmaline:

watermelon tourmaline crystal — Watermelon tourmaline. Photo by Rob Lavinsky.

I was thinking about how best to use the colors. Depictions of flowers seemed too literal and too specific for the way the colors flowed. I thought about doing a waterfall theme, but wasn’t happy with the feel, especially after looking at waterfalls.

Then I was looking at drafts on Handweaving.net, and stumbled on this gorgeous draft by Bonnie Inouye:

draft by Bonnie Inouye, looks like a stained glass window — Draft from Bonnie Inouye, Handweaving.net draft #60970

I love this draft. In particular, I love the blurry lines from the advancing twill design, which suggest a design in the distance, set against the sharp bars in the center. It looks like a stained-glass window. Or like a butterfly’s wings, with the soft colors against the sharp veining that holds the wings together:

monarch butterfly — Monarch butterfly. Photo by Erin Wilson.

blue morpho butterfly — Morpho butterfly (I think). Photo by Anne Lambeck.

I’m envisioning a three-quarter or full circle cape with the body of the garment in those lovely pink-and-green tourmaline jewel colors, and with dark green “veins” branching through the garment like the veins on butterfly wings.

As the wearer opened her arms, the “wings” of the butterfly would open, revealing the pink and green.

I’m also considering making the cape so that, when the cape is draped normally, most of what you see is dark green, and you only see the pink and green portions when the arms are spread. In that case I’d be tempted to name the piece Coronavirus Chrysalis. Or maybe just the far more timeless Chrysalis.

The downside to designing the cape like that, of course, is that nobody would see the beautiful pink and green most of the time. It would make a dramatic fashion show garment, but not a very interesting one otherwise….unless, of course, I put a design on the back, where the cape would lie flat, and put the dark green covering the “wings” of the cape.

So many possibilities!

I’m now about 2/3 of the way through tying on the sample warp. The pink and green areas are tied on, now I’m working on the green warp:

This warp is going onto Maryam, and is designed to test whether the pink and green painted warp areas will stay cohesive enough to look good when woven. Also to test the concept for the overall patterning. The warp is 3.5 yards long, and 14.5 inches wide.

Because Maryam is threaded up at 60 ends per inch rather than Grace’s 90 ends per inch, I’ve doubled up the threads to get a good solid cloth. So the resulting sample will be heavier and coarser than the final cloth, but it should still tell me everything I need to know.

Next step is designing the first sample. Bonnie’s draft won’t work for my purposes, so I’ll have to create my own.

Finally, outside, things are happening.

The tomatoes are shooting upwards. I’ll have to hang the trellises this weekend:

The mulberries are ripening. I shook the tree this morning, with very tasty results:

My ginger is sending up shoots. (This is culinary ginger – the stuff you eat. I mostly grow it because the leaves smell so wonderful when you brush against them. But it’s nice having ginger on the back stoop, too! At least I’ll never absentmindedly run out. I love Chinese cooking, so that would be utter disaster.)

And, finally, the yellow irises are flowering. I wasn’t expecting them to bloom this year – I only planted them last year, and the purple irises are already done – but they appear to be, ahem, late bloomers.

(And yes, orange California poppies and roses in the background. The roses actually bloom all year round, even in December. There’s just no stopping them!)

That’s it for now!

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?

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….