textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

January 12, 2020 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

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!

December 30, 2019 by Tien Chiu 6 Comments

Knitting a blank

Forget drawing a blank. Why would you want to do that? I’m busy knitting them.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m planning to make Seasons of Creativity using knitted blanks to create color changes in the weft. So one of the things I need to do is sample weft yarns to make sure they’re suitable for use in knitted blanks. Not all yarns will work in knitted blanks – some stick together and refuse to unravel, some unravel too fast and turn into a tangled mess.

I also need to sample weft yarns generally, to see which yarns I like and which I don’t.

And, of course, I need to sample colors to see what colors are suitable for the project.

In fact, there is a ton of sampling that needs to be done for Seasons of Creativity, and left to my own devices I would happily spend the next 2-3 months methodically sampling all the color combinations needed to make sure that the piece comes out perfect.

Alas, the deadline for Convergence entry is February 5. For those who aren’t good with calendars, that is exactly 38 days from now.

Since I was a project manager for twenty years, which is to say that I hate schedule drama (schedule drama is the arch-nemesis of every project manager), I’m calculating backwards from the entry date. 5 days of extra time for rework should something go wrong. 10 days of weaving time (it’s 15,000 picks!), especially considering that launching a class around the end of January. 2 days for mending, wet-finishing and prepping for photography, retouching photos, etc. That leaves 21 days for all the sampling, ordering any additional yarns, knitting and dyeing the blanks, etc. Three weeks sounds like a lot of time, but considering I’m working full time AND need to have a second piece ready for Complexity a month later, that’s pedal-to-the-metal speed.

So I will have to be far more efficient about sampling than usual, and do less sampling than I’m generally comfortable with. This will be interesting!

Anyway, I still have a week of vacation left, so I’m going to make the most of it. I’ve already decided to use mercerized cotton or a mix of mercerized cotton and silk for the leaf motifs in Seasons of Creativity, so that’s easy – I knitted up a blank or two yesterday and will do a few more this morning so I can test colors.

However, for the stars and butterflies, things are a bit more complicated. I am planning to use a combination of weft yarns for this section of Seasons of Creativity, but I’m not sure which yarns I want to use yet. Here are the yarns I’m thinking of using:

yarns I'm considering using for Seasons of Creativity

On the left is a gorgeous, very fine reeled silk yarn that I bought on eBay about ten years ago. Second from the left is a beautiful ultrafine silk yarn with a metallic silver thread twisted in – it was originally intended for weaving obi. I bought it from John Marshall a few years at a show. The photo really doesn’t do it justice – glitter doesn’t show up well in photos.

Third from the left is a sparkle yarn from Giovanna Imperia Designs. Again, the photo doesn’t do it justice. And on the far right are some iridescent yarns, again from Giovanna Imperia Designs.

All of these are very fine yarns, 20,000 yards per pound or so. So my plan is to use three strands as weft. I’ve knitted seventeen blanks in various combinations of the threads, with waste yarn in between the blanks. Here are a few of them. (Pardon my messy desk!)

some of the knitted blanks I'm using to sample for Seasons of Creativity

And here’s what a single blank looks like:

a single knitted blank for samples — a single knitted blank for sampling

You may be wondering about the single row of larger stitches midway through the blank. It’s a marker row. I put in a row of larger stitches every 50 stitches when I’m knitting a blank. In the bigger blank I will put in a bigger set of marker rows every 500 rows. It lets me tell where I am in the blank – so I can put in color changes accurately when I’m dyeing. That’s because knitted blanks are unpredictably stretchy, especially when wet, and they’re also very long. If I didn’t put in the marker, I’d have a 30-foot snake of wet knitting that started out 19 feet long and where on earth do I put the color changes? With the marker rows, I can simply count along the marker rows and know exactly where to put the color changes.

Now that I have the blanks, my next step will be figuring out how to use them. (Yeah, I know that’s backwards.) Today’s plan is to create a test file to see how butterflies, stars, and leaves weave up in each of the weft combinations, and also to figure out how best to sample the colors. It’s quite possible that the only way to sample the color combinations efficiently is, well, to weave the final product. The control freak in me is not happy about this, but perhaps I simply need to learn how to let go and “wing it” for a change!

Once I’ve figured out how to use the blanks, I’ll need to dye them. So today will also be a dye day. Tomorrow I’ll rinse and dry the blanks, and Wednesday I’ll (hopefully) start weaving my samples!

December 18, 2019 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

“Seasons of Creativity,” sketch 2

Now that I’m home again, I’ve restarted work on Seasons of Creativity. I was thinking about it on my trip, but trying doing complex Photoshop work with a mouse on a 13″ laptop screen, when you’re used to working with a pen on a 22″ tablet-monitor, is like trying to move a giant pile of sand with tweezers. After about five minutes I gave up.

Here’s the sketch for “Seasons of Creativity” now:

(Apologies for the disappearing leaves – on my tablet-monitor the darker leaves show up clearly, on the other monitor they are so dark they nearly disappear against the black. Yet both monitors were color-calibrated using professional equipment. So I have no idea how they will appear on your monitor. Go figure.)

I like this sketch a lot better. Conceptually, the idea is that the leaves are falling down, decaying, and reappearing as sparks of new ideas, which evolve into butterflies of new work that then fly off in new directions. The previous sketch had transformed the leaves directly into butterflies, which seemed to leave out the critical step of genesis. There was ripening and harvest, then decay, but the immediate appearance of butterflies seemed to suggest the immediate springing forth of new work, and it just doesn’t happen that way.

Here’s the initial sketch, to jog your memory:

previous sketch for "Seasons of Creativity"

The new sketch is a lot cleaner visually, and works better conceptually. Though I like the colors better in the old sketch – I think I may lighten the colors a bit in the new sketch, and replace the dark blue with spring green and pastel purple/light blue.

Which gets me to colors. Experienced weavers will no doubt be looking at “Seasons of Creativity” and saying WTF? How on earth are you going to get that many colors into a single piece without using a bazillion wefts? Especially with a solid black warp on the loom?

Short answer: painted wefts.

I’m planning to use four wefts for this piece (for non-weavers: weft threads are the ones that run cross-wise across the fabric). The piece is woven “sideways” – the warp runs from left to right in the image, so the weft appears to run top to bottom. (This is accomplished by taking the finished cloth and turning it sideways. 🙂 )

One weft will be black, for the background. The other four will be dyed in different stripes of changing colors. Different leaves and butterflies will be woven with different wefts, allowing me a wide variety of colors with a limited number of wefts. Voila! Magic.

Let me show you how this works. Here’s the pattern of colors for weft #1. If you were to see only the weft down the length of the piece, here’s what you’d see:

colors for weft #1 in "Seasons of Creativity" — “Seasons of Creativity,” weft #1

And here are the leaves that are woven with weft #1 on top. All other wefts are hiding on the bottom of the fabric when these leaves/butterflies are being woven:

(Technically this is showing the black background, which is weft #4, as well as the brightly colored weft #1, but it’s much easier to see the motifs against the black background, so I left it in.)

Here is the color pattern for weft #2:

And here are its leaves/butterflies:

weft 2 color pattern for Seasons of Creativity

Here’s weft #3:

Weft 3 color pattern for Seasons of Creativity

And its leaves/butterflies:

Weft 3 leaves/butterflies for Seasons of Creativity

Put them all together and you get the original sketch:

2nd sketch for "Seasons of Creativity" — “Seasons of Creativity”

Now, you might wonder how I plan to get all those color changes, and especially how I plan to get those nice blended colors at the boundaries, since dyeing a bazillion skeins of weft yarn takes a lot of time and results in ugly, sharp color changes.

Well, some of you may remember Autumn Splendor, and the knitted blanks I used to create ten excruciatingly accurate matching panels of handwoven fabric for that piece:

The piece looks like the sleeves and front panels (and back panels, and side panels, and facings) were dyed in a single bout. ‘Tain’t so. I simply dyed the weft so the color changes matched up precisely, using knitted blanks.

Knitted blanks are long rectangular pieces of knitted fabric that you dye and then unravel to use as yarn in something else. Knitters commonly use them for making socks. I use them for controlling weft color changes. Here’s one of the (insanely long) knitted blanks for Autumn Splendor:

I figure that all I need to do is create three of those, in precisely defined color intervals, and I’ll be in business.

I’m also thinking of using four different yarns – mercerized cotton for the warp and the leaves, unmercerized cotton for the background, silk for the stars and the butterflies, and iridescent thread carry-alongs for the stars and butterflies, but will have to do some serious sampling there to make sure the proportions and aspect ratios come out right.

I’m really going to have to get cracking on all this, though – the deadline for Convergence entry is February 5, which gives me less than 2 months to get everything done. And the deadline for Complexity is coming up a few weeks after that – I’d like to have a piece in Complexity as well, which really puts me under the gun. No time to lose!!

December 7, 2019 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Learning CAD design!

I’m off on a little vacation right now, visiting family for a couple days in Maryland before looping up to New York City to visit my old friend Edouard for a few days. It’s a bit of a working vacation, but I’m also using some of the time for personal projects that I wouldn’t have time or focus for if I were at home, distracted by a zillion other things. One of them is (finally!) learning CAD design so I can create models for 3D printing!

The driver for this project is velvet weaving. My design-genius friend Dave came up with a design for a better velvet-weaving spool rack and tensioning system, but it requires some parts that are probably best 3D-printed. My esteemed spouse is currently busy doing other things, so I’ve decided to learn how to do my own designs for 3D printed objects. After all, how else am I supposed to design a 3D-printed flamethrower with which to take over the world? (Don’t worry, you can 3D-print in metal. I wouldn’t try to print a plastic flamethrower!)

Alas, the learning curve for CAD design software is as steep as the learning curve for Photoshop, so while at home I never had the peace, quiet, and free time to sit down and figure it out. While visiting family, though, I’ve got a lot more free time, so I spent about two hours this morning working my way through this excellent tutorial, and have now created this lovely stamp:

Fusion 360 screenshot — Fusion 360 stamp model

It was both far easier and far more complicated than I thought! I’m giving the knowledge a couple hours to settle into my head before tackling the next lesson. The author has a series, Learn Fusion 360 in 30 Days, on YouTube – I’m going to get through as many of the lessons as I can in the week that I’m traveling. I don’t need to become an expert in order to do the few simple projects I have in mind, but knowledge is never wasted!

Meanwhile, work on “Seasons of Creativity” continues. I think I’ve figured out how to do it with three painted-gradient wefts and one solid black weft. I may throw in some iridescent wefts for the butterflies and have ordered some wefts from Giovanna Imperia Designs. I’m currently working on designing the leaves, and will work on the butterflies next. I expect progress on that to be slow as working with Photoshop on a laptop screen is cramped and difficult – but, well, we’ll see. More photos once I get further along in my sketches!