Tien Chiu

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Lava Flow

The Handwoven Magazine “Not Just for Socks” reader challenge inspired this shawl, a collapse weave in two different sock yarns.  I was rummaging through my stash of sock yarns for the contest, and found some Cascade Fixation, an elastic sock yarn with a crinkled appearance that reminded me of cooled lava.  This, in turn, brought to mind my trip to Hawaii and the beautiful rivulets of fire in the lava flows there.  So I set out to recreate the beauty of flowing lava, fiery ruffles against crinkly black stone, flecked with fire:

"Lava Flow" handwoven shawl, collapse weave
“Lava Flow” handwoven shawl, collapse weave in sock yarn
"Lava Flow" handwoven shawl, collapse weave
“Lava Flow” handwoven shawl, collapse weave, closeup

I scrunch-dyed some Knitpicks Bare sock yarn in various shades of flame (red, orange, gold, bright yellow), and warped it in stripes, alternating with 1″ sections of  a black elastic sock yarn, Cascade Fixation.  I warped the two yarns separately, with the Knitpicks Bare going onto my sectional warp beam, and the Cascade Fixation wound into chains, with each chain weighted separately.

I then wove several samples with different weft yarns:

samples for handwoven collapse weave shawl
Samples for “Lava Flow”

After considerable hemming and hawing, I decided that while I didn’t like the gold metallic on its own, it might add pizazz to one of the two other options.  I paired it with the multicolored red-orange-yellow weft (bottom right), and loved the results so much I decided to weave up the entire shawl using 1 strand of gold metallic and 1 strand of variegated red-orange-yellow 30/2 silk.

For this shawl, because of the collapse, I used a very open sett and beat, setting both warp yarns at 8 epi and weaving at about 6 picks per inch.  (Normal sett for a balanced tabby weave is 10-12 epi in most sock yarns.)  It worked beautifully – the open sett/beat gave room for the elastic yarn to “do its thing”, and I got about 50% shrinkage and beautiful orange ruffles!

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Ocean Sunset II

before-wet-finishing

This was a variation on the Ocean Sunset shawl, except that I made it with a knitted blank!

Knitted blanks are an interesting concept taught to me by Nancy Roberts of Machine Knitting to Dye For.  You knit up a rectangular piece of fabric, dye it, and then unravel it and reuse the yarn.  Using this technique you can get gradual color changes WITHOUT having  to dye a zillion skeins, and you can get other effects as well (see the “Crazy Colors” shawl for an example).  In this case, I dyed a single blank a gradual change from yellow to red and back again to see what would happen when I wove it up!

I am of mixed minds about this shawl.  I don’t like the boldness of the lines near the bottom of the shawl, but I like the idea of the gradual color change.  I think I may try this idea again, but with a simpler pattern.

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black jewel

Closeup of the center pattern for Black Jewel

This shawl, which is one of my favorites, is woven on a 2/28 nm silk warp dyed in 29 colors, with a black cashmere yarn of about the same weight as weft.  The colors are so close to each other that visually they are almost indistinguishable, producing a very nice gradual fade from turquoise to fuchsia and back again.

This kind of gradual color change has been so successful that I am embarking on a new adventure: dyeing a full color wheel in 60/2 silk, in gradually changing colors!  I estimate that it will take about 120 skeins to get all the way around the color wheel, but fortunately I have enough 60/2 silk on hand that I can do it.  Then I can REALLY play!

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ocean sunset shawl

Photo courtesy Joe Decker, of Rockslide Photography
Photo courtesy Joe Decker, Rockslide Photography

This shawl came off the same warp as three other shawls, “Ocean Sunset II”, “Black Jewel”, and “Crazy Colors”.  (Click here to see the others.)  The shawl is made from 2/28 nm silk hand-dyed (by me!) in 60 colors – 29 in the warp and 21 in the weft.  It is woven in stripes, each stripe so similar in color to its neighbors that the transition appears seamless.  There are 58 stripes in the warp and far more in the weft.  Each warp stripe is only 1/2″ wide!

The pattern for this weft is displayed in the gallery thumbnails – it’s a network drafted pattern on 24 shafts, on a 4-shaft rosepath network.  As you can see, it’s a complex design, but I liked it a lot.  Woven, I think it’s maybe a little “busy” with all the color changes, but it’s still one of my favorite pieces.  Laid straight out it looks a bit stripey, but as you can see, it looks beautiful when rumpled (as it would be if you were wearing it)!  I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on this shawl.

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Silk & cashmere jacket

jacket

This came off the same warp as the goldenrod shawl and the garnet shawl. I dyed some 2/28 nm silk yarn for warp and some 2/28 nm cashmere for weft. For the warp, I alternated 2″ stripes of chestnut brown and golden brown; the weft I dyed a deep shade of eggplant.

The draft was my first attempt at network drafting, for which I had lots of generous help from Bonnie Inouye. Network drafting is a technique for making curved patterns in fabric, made available to the handweaving community by Alice Schlein in her book Network Drafting: An Introduction. It produces complex, curvy patterns with very little effort, and generally produces a very stable cloth.

Weaving the fabric for the jacket was quite a challenge; one of my shafts kept “floating” and so there were numerous flaws in the finished fabric.  But aha, the magic of cutting and sewing: I simply cut around the flaws!  There are a few visible in the finished piece, but on the whole it looks quite nice, better than the fabric did!

I lined the jacket with silk charmeuse, dyed chestnut brown to match the warp.  The pattern is a Butterick pattern, but I don’t recall the pattern number.