textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

April 13, 2020 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Chocolate and cows

Or, how I spent my Easter weekend…

First, the chocolate. (Because chocolate is so much more fun than cows!)

You may recall that awhile back, I made myself some low-sugar chocolate. Well, predictably, Jamie hoovered up most of the low-sugar chocolate, and after it ran out, asked me to make more. So I ordered another 6 kg of Valrhona’s Alpaco (my favorite flavor of their line), 3 kg of unsweetened and 3 kg of their 66% cacao solids. Over the weekend, I mixed 1 kg of each, tempered it, and made some 83% Alpaco chocolate. It’s very intensely chocolate, and low-sugar enough that I can eat it in small doses without feeling too bad about it (my blood sugar is, fortunately, very well-controlled). And, mixed with nuts and dried fruit, it’s even tastier!

Here’s what I made. First, plain chocolate bars. Here they are in the molds:

These are the heavy-duty, rigid polycarbonate molds used by professional chocolatiers. I’ve tried the thin, flimsy plastic molds sold to home cooks and I don’t know how anyone can succeed with them – they drive me crazy. So when I got rid of all my other molds I kept these four back, just in case I wanted to make bars again someday. I’m glad I did!

And here are the bars, unmolded:

They’re not absolutely perfect – they have a slightly matte finish instead of a high sheen – but that may be partly because of the high cocoa content, as the unsweetened chocolate doesn’t have as much cocoa butter as a couverture does. I’m not entirely sure about that. Doesn’t matter; they look quite good and will taste even better!

Here’s the peanut gianduja (aka: peanut butter mixed with chocolate, like the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, only much much better). Technically it’s not a gianduja as it contains no powdered sugar, but don’t tell anyone!

The front part contains “regular” (unsulfured) raisins, the middle golden (sulfured) raisins. The back part is plain peanut gianduja, and very tasty it is.

And here is the cherry almond chocolate:

Dried cherries and roasted almonds mixed with chocolate

This is still in what I consider the most glorious stage of chocolate: when it hasn’t quite fully set, and is a little matte in sheen. I don’t know why I find this moment in chocolatiering so beautiful – perhaps because it is so transitory. It lasts only a minute or two. The chocolate goes from a liquid, translucent shine to the hard, waxy sheen you see in chocolate bars. But in between is this soft, matte glow that I just love. It says, “The chocolate is tempered perfectly, and will come out great.”

For those who have dyed with indigo, it’s like that magical transformation from the yellow-green of antifreeze through beautiful shades of aqua to pure indigo blue, after you take the fiber out of the dyebath and the pigment oxidizes. It’s wonderful to see.

Meanwhile, about the cows…Um, yes, the cows. Actually, only about a quarter of a cow. I hope, anyway.

I’ve wanted a chest freezer for quite a few years. I like making big batches of food because it’s more efficient, but of course the freezer is only big enough to hold 1-2 two-gallon batches of soup or chili. A bigger freezer would allow me to do a bigger variety of foods, so I can still cook efficiently without having to eat chili for two weeks straight.

But for a variety of reasons, we never quite got around to getting a chest freezer.

Then the coronavirus hit. And the idea picked up some urgency.

I will admit to being both a gourmet and a pessimist. I buy my meat at the farmer’s market, and what with social distancing and the throngs that usually populate the farmer’s market, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before they either shut down the farmer’s market or shopping at the farmer’s market becomes completely untenable due to long lines etc.

Plus, supply chain issues may become a problem. There have already been reports of meat packing plants having problems with workers getting sick. My guy doesn’t get his meat processed at a big meat packing plant, but there’s nothing to prevent the workers at his place getting sick either. And while I’m sure I could live without meat if I needed to, I happen to like grass-fed beef, it’s better for the environment than corn-fed beef, and I REALLY don’t want to support factory farming.

So…a chest freezer and a bulk meat purchase seemed like a good idea. I called him up, and it turns out that I can get a quarter cow for $5.50/lb hanging weight. Hanging weight is the weight of the steer when they hang up the carcass for dry aging, right after it’s been slaughtered. In this case, I asked for the smallest steer they had, which turned out to be 600 pounds. So that was 150 pounds of meat.

That’s still a LOT of meat for two people, but it turns out that you lose about 40% of the weight during the dry aging and butchering process, so it will work out to about 90 lbs of actual meat. I’m asking for bones + offal (all the stuff they’ll give me, anyway) so I might get a bunch more – we’ll see.

Anyway, we have a 7 cubic foot chest freezer (I had to exercise my Google-Fu and then call all over town to get it – apparently everyone and their kid sister wants one right now too, for the same reasons I want one!), and the quarter-cow will take up about half of it. I’d make a crack about the dead bodies taking up the other half, but since I quit my job as a project manager, I don’t need to dispose of dead bodies any more! 🙂

Now, of course, if you have a quarter-cow in the freezer, plus a quarter-freezer’s worth of cat treats that must not get stale (because priorities!), you have to organize it all. Dumping a hundred packages of beef into a freezer at random is a recipe for chaos. My tentative plan is to file the quarter-cow neatly into canvas tote bags, classified into steaks, roasts, ground beef, and so on. Using tote bags will make it easier to haul stuff in and out since tote bags (unlike cardboard boxes) come with handles. Wire baskets might be better, but I don’t have wire baskets to fit the chest freezer and am wary of scratching up the interior.

Of course, you then have the problem of differentiating a sea of identical canvas tote bags.

I bet you can guess where this is going…

Yep! I spent part of yesterday tie-dyeing canvas tote bags so I could differentiate frozen cow body parts:

The colors aren’t the most brilliant, but I was dyeing with the colors I was using for the dye samples for the double weave cape, and I was dyeing on an off-white canvas base. But I’m happy with the results anyway – I will certainly be able to tell them apart in the freezer!

And, with that, I’m off to other things. I’ll update you on the latest set of yarn samples once they’re dry.

April 12, 2020 by Tien Chiu 9 Comments

Unexpected results

Today I’m giving thanks for my methodical, always-sample-first approach!

I was considering the “Just Do It” approach and just diving into dyeing my warp. But a little voice said, “Mixed fibers – you don’t know what will happen!” So I wound and dyed a small test swatch first. And boy howdy, am I glad I did!

Here’s the effect I was after – the fuchsia and green swatch on the right:

navy blue and fuchsia/green tie-dyed swatches

Here are the colors I used:

four dye swatches - fuchsia and green on top

And here is what I wound up with, after dyeing:

Yarn sample in fuchsia, salmon, and purple, with just a little bit of green

I’ve got lovely shades of fuchsia, purple, and pinky-orange, but where did the green go??

Here’s what I’m pretty sure happened.

The fuchsia struck equally well on both cotton and silk. No problem there.

The yellow struck preferentially on one fiber (I suspect the silk). It got zooped up immediately, leaving none for the other fiber.

The blue either attached preferentially to the other fiber (I think the cotton), OR the fuchsia and yellow hit first, and saturated out the dye sites on the silk (silk has fewer bonding sites than cotton), leaving nowhere for the blue to attach. So only one fiber got the blue dye.

The end result: the blue only dyed one fiber and the yellow only dyed one fiber. The fuchsia dyed both fibers. So I wound up with fuchsia in the areas I dabbed with fuchsia, a mix of salmon (fuchsia+yellow) and purple (fuchsia+blue) in the areas where fuchsia mixed with green, and blue and yellow and a teeny-tiny bit of green in the areas that were pure green.

Since I deliberately made most of the areas a mix of fuchsia and green (I didn’t want a whole lot of green), that meant that I wound up with a LOT of fuchsia-and-purple and almost no green.

So that idea is DOA. Good thing I sampled first!

At this point I have a few options:

I can try to get green from a different mix of dyes. There are four “pure” blues in the MX dyes and two yellows. A different combo may produce a green less inclined to “break” into component dyes. I’m a bit skeptical of this since I’ve heard all the blues are slower-striking than all the yellows, but it might be worth a try.

I can change the colors I’m trying to achieve. This seems like a sounder approach. If I use a single “pure” dye, or two more closely related colors than magenta and green (which are color-wheel opposites), I’ll probably get less chaos. If I want to see my pattern clearly, it would be good to use two colors of similar values (darkness). I’ll have to think about what colors, though, and of course do considerable sampling. I may be back to my favorite color combination, blue and orange-red, again. Not the worst of color combinations (I mean, it’s my favorite for a reason), but I’d kind of like to experiment with something different, too.

Whatever I do, though, I’ll definitely have to sample. Doing a mixed fiber warp is complicating things more than I’d expected. But that just makes it more fun!

April 8, 2020 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Double weave cape

I’m moving along on my new project. I’ve decided it will be a cape, Vogue 8959:

The version she’s wearing requires 4.25 yards of 45″ fabric, or 3 yards of 60″ fabric. I could do a longer, floor length version that would require 7 yards of 45″ fabric or 6 yards of 60″ fabric, according to the pattern. Of course, since my warp is only 29″ wide, I’ll have to weave double the yardage.

I haven’t yet decided whether to do the floor length or the knee length version. Since I’m impatient to get started, I decided to weave first and ask questions later, so I wound a 20-yard warp, 29″ wide, which should be more than enough to sample, weave all the yardage for the floor-length version, and have plenty left over. If I do the shorter version, I’m sure I can come up with uses for the extra warp.

Because I wanted interesting color variation in the dyed yarns, I wound the warp with three different fibers: silk, mercerized cotton, and unmercerized cotton. They will take up the dyes differently, producing a slightly variegated effect even using the exact same dyes. I also used slightly different yarn sizes. The silk is 30/2 silk at 7500 yards per pound; the cotton yarns are 20/2 cotton at 8400 yards per pound, slightly thinner. They’re mixed throughout the warp, though, so the difference in thickness shouldn’t become a tension issue. It will just add a tiny bit of physical texture to the warp.

Here’s a pic of the warp being wound on my 3-meter warping mill:

20 yard warp being wound on my warping mill

There are actually two warps, since the piece will be double weave. Grace is threaded and sett at 90 epi, which means any warp that goes onto the loom needs to be sett at 90 ends per inch. Practically speaking, that means it either needs to be an incredibly fine-threads warp (half the weight of sewing thread) or double weave. Fine threads can be finicky, so I’m voting for double weave.

Since I’m doing double weave, I need to wind and dye two warp bouts. I’ve decided to dye one in mottled fuchsia and forest green, and the other in mottled indigo blue and navy blue. I’m currently planning to use an orange weft for both, but I want to do a lot of testing before I settle on a final color.

Here are the dye swatches for the colors I’m planning to use for the warp:

I did do a quick simulation of what the colors might look like once woven. These colors are striped rather than splotchy because that’s all the weaving software can do, but it gives an idea of how the colors might blend visually:

color simulations — simulation of fuchsia and green threads with an orange weft

The finished cloth will not look anything like this, but at least it gives me a starting-point for thinking about the piece.

I’ve finished winding both warp bouts. Next step is to dye a small test bout in the fuchsia and forest green, both to test my dyeing technique and to see how the colors blend on the different fiber types. If I have time, I’ll do that today.

March 28, 2020 by Tien Chiu

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

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.

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