weaving | Tien Chiu's Blog

October 6, 2018 by Tien Chiu

More than my weight in weasels

101 days ago, I was a couch potato. Today?

That’s me squatting 780 weasels (195 pounds) – more than my body weight!

And here’s me at 99 days, deadlifting 700 weasels (175 pounds):

That kind of improvement exceeds my wildest expectations – in fact, it sounds like something you hear about in an ad on late-night TV. You know, “I was a 48-year old couch potato…but after 101 days of Weasel-Power! Boot Camp, I was squatting over 780 weasels!” That would totally have me going out and buying their Weasel-Power video series and their “Weasel-Flex” exercise widget! (For the more gently minded, of course, there would also be “Weasel Yoga – Make yourself supple as a weasel!”. Or – for you digital folks – the electronic game with social media leaderboards, “Wea-Fit”.)

But the amazing part (to me) is that I’ve made this massive improvement without a single injury. I’ve had plenty of muscle soreness, and I’ve tweaked my wrist, shoulder, etc. a few times, but no major injuries and no soreness lasting more than a few days. This kind of improvement isn’t my expertise and certainly isn’t luck: it’s having an excellent trainer. Touissant has done a fantastic job of encouraging me to push as hard as I can without going beyond my physical limits (general or from minor injuries), and helping me improve my form so I can lift more efficiently while staying safer.

Just as importantly, working with Touissant has gradually enabled me to trust that I’m not going to hurt myself lifting, which has enabled me to put everything I’ve got into the workout, rather than worrying about whether I’m going to hurt myself this time. I have a long history of overdoing it exercising and then losing months to injuries – now that I can trust him to watch out for me, I don’t have to unconsciously limit myself and can put everything I’ve got into the task at hand.

Another thing that’s made rapid progress possible is that Mike and I are working out together. We get fewer exercises done total, but it’s more fun to be able to work out with a friend and partner, so I’m more comfortable working out and more motivated to show up.

All of which has made me realize how important having a mentor and a peer group is to learning/doing anything new. People have asked me how I learn each new medium with lightning speed. I’ve always said, “Because I focus obsessively on things and I read a lot,” but I’ve also realized it’s because I reflexively seek out mentors and social groups that can answer my questions, encourage me, and keep me from getting frustrated when I tackle my super-over-ambitious projects.

I think this is true for others as well. So the online course I’m developing will offer both direct mentoring (from me, of course) plus a forum where students can interact, encourage each other, discuss the exercises and their current work, etc. Because, especially for people who are nervous about a new topic, having someone to guide, encourage, and support you makes learning much easier (sometimes it’s what makes learning possible at all!), and having a peer group to work with helps you put that learning into practice once class is over.

Speaking of the class…I’ve been pretty quiet about my teaching business for the last few months, mostly because I’ve been hard at work on it! But I’m getting closer to releasing my class. Close enough that I’m comfortable divulging a few details.

The class is going to cover the essentials of color in handweaving. The first part will cover basic color theory: the fundamental properties of color (hue, value, and saturation), how colors interact when interlaced in cloth, and a brief discussion of color mixing.

The second part talks about design: How to set the mood of a handwoven project by controlling drama, energy, and ambiance with color.

And the third part walks you through the design process: Choosing and using a warp color, weft color, and draft to achieve the mood you want.

The class will be offered in two formats. One will be a 1-2 hour streaming video plus handouts. That will (cross fingers) be released in November.

The other class option will be a full online course, with a discussion forum, exercises, feedback from the instructor (me!), etc. I’m planning to open registration in mid to late November, with the first session starting in January.

Here are two slides from the section on the design process:

Designing with Color - design process slide #2 — Designing with Color – design process slide #2

Designing with Color - design process slide #3 — Designing with Color – design process slide #3

I hope that, once my course is released, my students will be making weaselly fast progress with color!

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — By Keven Law, via Wikimedia Commons

July 16, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Wow, was THAT a party!!

I left for Convergence on Thursday, July 5, and returned the following Thursday, totally exhausted of seven days of nonstop partying with 1,500 fellow weavers.

I started with the Sheep to Shawl on Saturday, as part of the Black Sheep Handweavers Guild (one of my two weaving guilds). Five spinners, a carder, and me (the weaver) – plus an educator to talk to passersby so the team didn’t get distracted. We had a lot of fun, and finished our shawl well within the 4-hour time limit:

sheep to shawl contest - Black Sheep Handweavers Guild — sheep to shawl contest – Black Sheep Handweavers Guild

For the unfamiliar, sheep to shawl contests originated when a medieval English lord bet one of his friends that the workers on his estate could shear a sheep at dawn, then wash the fleece, card, spin, dye, weave, and sew it into a jacket for him to wear to dinner. The workers succeeded (which still flabbergasts me!). But remember, these were trained professionals, kids – do not try this at home!

Ah, who am I kidding?? Bring on the sheep to shawl contests!

Modern day sheep to shawl contests aren’t nearly as strenuous. Typically each team starts with a washed fleece, then cards, spins, and plies it into yarn. The team gets to warp the loom before the contest, either with handspun or commercial yarn – so all that needs to be done during the contest is weave the shawl and finish the ends. There are variations on the rules, but the basic idea is to get from a fleece to a shawl within a time limit.

I had some funny conversations about the contest, like this one:

“I thought they were going to start with a sheep!”

“Nah, the conference venue wouldn’t let them have sheep.”

“Couldn’t we have told them they were comfort sheep?”

The day after the Sheep to Shawl, I taught my 90 minute seminar about critique. I’m pretty sure most of the students were expecting me to say something totally different – mostly because we have such terrible misconceptions about critique. The three-bullet summary of my 90-minute seminar:

Critique is about evaluating your work in order to make it stronger.
You get WAY more improvement out of taking good ideas and making them spectacular than you do from fixing flaws.
So in critique, you want to focus on finding the things you like, the things that are working, so you can figure out how to make them amazing. NEVER focus on finding flaws.

There was a lot more to the seminar, of course – I’m thinking of recording it and putting it on YouTube, actually, because I got a LOT of positive feedback on it afterwards. In my copious free time, of course.

(As soon as I find out where I stashed all that free time…let’s see…could I have left it in the studio? Hey, what’s this black hole doing here…?)

Monday I took two classes from Mickey Stam – one about “Weaving Your Passion” and the other about “Opening Your Weaving to New Possibilities”. She had a really interesting approach to brainstorming new areas for exploration and some very practical advice on how to move forward with making, exhibiting, and selling textile art.

And Tuesday night started Barbara Setsu Pickett’s class on velvet weaving! I had been looking forward to this class for months – after Wendy Landry’s lectures at Complex Weavers Seminars 2016, I really wanted to try velvet weaving.

Velvet weaving is not for the timid. You weave velvet with two warps: the ground cloth warp, which weaves the backing, and the pile warp, which produces all those lovely fluffy cut ends.

Here’s how it works:

Weave a header of ground cloth. Then lift whatever pile warps you want to show, and insert a grooved rod. Weave a few more picks of ground cloth (to hold the pile), then insert another rod. After placing three rods, run a razor-sharp blade through the groove in the rearmost rod to cut the pile, remove the rod, and insert it in the next pile-warp shed. The five or six picks of ground-cloth/binder weft will (at least in theory) be tight enough to hold the pile warp in place.

It looks like this:

And here’s a short video of me cutting the pile (with a scalpel taped to a depth where it will cut the pile but – in theory – not your cloth):

Swiping razor blades down a thin groove right next to cloth! Relying on just eight picks of weft to hold your entire pile warp in place! What could go wrong??

But wait! There’s more!

If you want to weave figured velvet – and let’s face it, haven’t we all desperately wanted to weave figured velvet at least once in our lives? – every single one of those pile warp ends needs to be tensioned separately. That’s because figured velvet requires having pile in some places but not others, like this sample Barbara showed us:

Looping a strand of pile warp over a rod takes a lot more thread than just weaving it into the ground cloth. So if you are weaving pile in some areas but not others, your pile warp threads will take up at vastly different rates. So the only way to get even tension is to tension every pile thread all by itself.

At the Lisio Foundation, and other velvet weaving studios, they have huge racks that sit behind the looms. Each rack is full of individually weighted spools. Each spool contains (more or less) one pile warp. Multiply by a couple hundred pile warps, and what do you get?

…a ton of spaghetti (and an entire week of rethreading) if you accidentally cut the cloth, or if you haven’t beaten tightly enough to hold in the pile warp ends when you start cutting the pile.

Whee! Velvet is easy!! No problem!! What could go wrong??

Since we didn’t have giant racks, and some of us (including Barbara) flew in, we used an ingenious device (called a cantra) that Barbara designed for her classes. Here’s what my setup looked like:

In the top of the cantra is a piece of egg crate (you can get it in your local hardware store; it’s used as a diffuser for fluorescent lighting). The pile thread warps go up from their weighted bobbins through the egg crate dividers, up and over, through a little cross at the top, and then down to a stick held over the back beam. And from there to the rest of the loom.

The cantra is about three feet tall – which means you can weave three feet of pile warp before having to stop and unwind all the bobbins. And there are a LOT of bobbins. I wove a finer velvet than the rest of my classmates, so I had 15 pile warps per inch. So all the bobbins you see dangling there were required for weaving a two-inch-wide strip of velvet! For a wider warp that would mean unwinding bobbins for approximately all eternity, every time you need to advance. Better make that cantra tall.

You may have noticed that there appears to be quite a bit of stuff in that photo. I actually had a LOT more stuff than that, since I had to come prepared for the Sheep to Shawl and my own lecture, too. Plus, in a burst of generosity, I volunteered to bring an entire suitcase worth of rayon machine embroidery thread for my classmates to use, since I was driving anyway.

This led to a new linguistic discovery when I arrived. I now know that the sweetest words a bellhop can say, in any language, are “Don’t worry, we’ll deliver everything to your room. Have a nice stay.”

(I was AMAZED that he fit all that stuff on the cart. I later discovered that they take classes on how to load these!)

The bellhop who delivered the loom to my room, however, was apparently traumatized by the experience. He kept saying, “I’ve never had to move anything this big and this delicate before!” I didn’t have the heart to tell him what the rest of his week was going to be like. 🙂 (Though I did tip him $5 to help him get over the trauma.)

And here’s my finished strip of velvet – three days’ work!

I played with short pile, tall pile, cut pile, uncut pile, and all possible combinations of the above. It was a TON of fun, and I want to work more with this on the jacquard loom. I’m already plotting ways to set up a rack of spools behind the loom. Stay tuned!

Sadly, it looks like more travel is not in my immediate future. A good friend is going to Rwanda next week, and I was going to help him with his excess baggage allowance by stowing away in his luggage. Alas, this is not going to happen: The cats have grounded me.

“You have One Job! One Job! And that is staying right here and catering to our whims, not running off to Reno and spending a week partying with your no-good human friends!”

“But you had another perfectly good cat-slave to cater to your whims! And I made sure he understood that he was supposed to give Fritz belly rubs, play with you, and do whatever you told him to do while I was gone!”

“That’s not the point. You had One Job, and you weren’t doing it.”

“Aw, but Tigress…”

“No buts! You’re grounded until further notice. Now go clean your room.”

My cats never let me have any fun…

Fritz and Tigress, Rulers of the Universe

May 22, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Breakthrough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at him. “Too wordy?”

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

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

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

“What?” I said petulantly.

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

“Frustrating as hell.”

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

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

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

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

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

March 3, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Delightfully thorny puzzles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s the finished piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fritz and Tigress hunting imaginary birds

February 9, 2018 by Tien Chiu

A new weaving podcast!!

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

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

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

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

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