Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / Archives for peacock feather shawl

September 5, 2010 by Tien Chiu

…and a touch of glitz

I liked the peacock feather from yesterday, but it seemed a little drab.  After all, peacocks are brilliantly colored, are they not?  So I got out one of the pirns of fine gold thread left over from the wedding-coat fabric, and wove two more feathers.  And here, in full, is the evolution of the peacock feather design:

The evolution of the handwoven peacock feather design
The evolution of the handwoven peacock feather design

You can see that it starts out blobby (a little like a Dr. Seuss green space alien, if Dr. Seuss had created anything like that), then the feathery bits appear, and by the time you get to the fourth one down the basic design is in place.  After that I changed out some of the colors (when my embroidery thread arrived), and finally the last two have glitter.

Here is a photo of the 4 most recent iterations:

Final four handwoven peacock-feather samples, showing the evolution in wefts
Final four handwoven peacock-feather samples, showing the evolution in wefts

I went back and forth for awhile on whether I thought the glitz was pretty or just gaudy, but after seeing it in many different types of lighting, I like the glitz a lot.  And the thread, being very fine, only stiffens the “hand” a little bit,  still well within the parameters for a shawl.

Oh, and here’s the back side:

wrong side of handwoven taquete peacock feathers
wrong side of handwoven taquete peacock feathers

Lillian was right: it will need to be lined.

I have now gotten the Cibacron F “pure” color samples back from Ginny, which means I can now get started on dyeing the Cibacron F color wheel.  However, I am still working on the Lanaset color wheel and the Lanaset color reproduction, not to mention making 10 fruitcakes this weekend, so I am not quite sure what I will tackle next.  Cibacron F may have to wait for during the week, though I’d hate to defer it.  Dawn is coming later and later, making it harder and harder to get a complete dyebath in before work.  And Cibacron F takes half an hour longer than Lanaset! so I may try to get some Cibacron F in this weekend, and save the Lanaset for working during the week.  I know from experience that I can get a Lanaset dyebath done in the mornings.

Anyway, I have selected the color I want to try matching.  It is Colourmart 60/2 silk, color “camel”, 2.5Y 7/3 in the Munsell system, and looks kinda like this (usual caveats about monitor colors, etc. being “off”):

color to duplicate for Munsell dye study group
color to duplicate for Munsell dye study group

I have dyed the first four test samples and will be looking at them later today or early tomorrow.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: dye study group, Munsell, peacock feather shawl, taquete, tied weaves

September 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Woven peacock feathers, 3rd sample

Finished weaving up the sample this morning:

3rd version of handwoven peacock feather design
3rd version of handwoven peacock feather design

The top row of peacock feathers is the previous design, the bottom row is the new design.

Changes:

  • Eliminated the areas of blended black and green around the outer edges of the feather
  • Replaced the dark green weft with a bright emerald green weft
  • Lengthened the shaft of the feather so it blended nicely with the end of the previous feather

Thoughts:

  • The new feather seems a lot fuller than the previous feather, because I eliminated the blended black and green areas, but I may add them back – it “feels” maybe a little TOO bold, could use some toning down.  Interesting since I really didn’t think the blended black and green sections were visibly different, but it does make a difference!
  • I like the longer feather shaft, the feather now feels complete instead of being crammed in with the next feather.
  • Bright emerald green weft works better than the darker green weft.  The pattern shows more clearly.

I will add back the areas of blended green and black and weave up another feather or two, and see if I like that better.  (The threads for the full shawl have not yet arrived, so I can’t start weaving the “real thing” yet!)

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: peacock feather shawl, taquete, tied weaves

September 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Statistics

Alice’s comment (on her blog) that she had recently reached her 1,000th blog post got me curious about mine.  So I looked in my Dashboard, and discovered that I had just passed 1,500!  But then, I have been blogging nearly eight years, since October 8, 2002.  On that fateful day, I left home and started my 6-month trek through Southeast Asia, blogging as I went.

Then I took a look at Google Analytics, which I set up around the same time I migrated my website.  To my surprise, in just 11 months, I’ve had 34,485 visitors from 164 countries, and served up over 134,707 pages.  At this rate, I should have nearly 150,000 “hits” this year!  That was a huge surprise.

Anyway, I did some fiddling and added the NeoCounter widget that Sandra Rude has on her blog, so now you, too, can see where people are coming from.

Creatively speaking, I’ve been booked in the evenings, so not much has happened except a little bit of fiddling with the peacock-feather draft.  I lengthened the end of the feather so there’s not as much overlap, and I think it looks much nicer now:

peacock feather design, old version
peacock feather design, old version
peacock feather design, new version
peacock feather design, new version

In the old version there was a blobby bit, a solid green area that ran between the feathers and obscured the feathery bits at the top of each feather.  So I lengthened the shaft of the feather and made it narrower, to the point where the shaft blended neatly with the top of the next feather.

Today I plan to test-weave the revised version of the feather pattern.  Saturday the actual threads I’m using should arrive, and then I’ll do one more test-weave (to see if I like the colors), and then launch into the actual shawl.

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings, textiles, weaving Tagged With: peacock feather shawl, taquete, tied weaves

September 1, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Peacock feathers, round 2

I changed the original design for the peacock feathers to include more solid black between the feathery parts.  Here’s how it came out (look at the bottom row for the best view, as the top row still has the top part of the previous version):

handwoven peacock feathers, round 2
handwoven peacock feathers, round 2

Contrast this with Round 1:

handwoven peacock feather design, in five-weft taquete
handwoven peacock feather design, in five-weft taquete

The new version looks much better, more feathery and less blobby.

Lillian (thanks Lillian!) made an excellent point when she said that the back side would not be the reverse of the front side, hence (possibly) not suitable for a shawl.  (I am pretty sure the drape will be OK, as the four-weft taquete came out very fluid.)  I’m still turning over various possibilities for lining the shawl – the main problem being how to attach the two fabrics together without losing the drape or spending 40 hours catchstitching them together – but it seems unlikely to succeed, at least for now.

(Those of you jumping up and down, waving your hands excitedly, and saying, “Stitched double weave!” are quite correct – that would give me one layer of plainweave to hide the bottom layer of the taquete, and I could then decorate the plainweave, if desired, using surface design techniques.  The only small problem is that I’d have to resley at double the sett, since it is a doubleweave, which in turn means re-beaming, re-threading, re-sleying, oh, heck, just do a different warp.  (Not to mention, six shuttles!)  So, I may try this at some point, but not on this warp.)

This leaves me the interesting question of what to do with the fabric.  The pattern is really too assertive (and too large) to use in clothing, and taquete is too delicate to use in something like cushions.  A wall hanging it’s not.  So it’s hard to think of what to do with the fabric, except decorative stuff like Christmas cards, and I’m not sure where peacock feathers fit into Christmas cards.  I feel like I’m all dressed up with no place to go!

While I’m pondering this quandary, I received a cross-stitch sampler book in the mail yesterday.  Someone (I’m afraid I don’t remember who) suggested to me that cross-stitch samplers are a great place to get design motifs, because the individual components of the sampler are so small.  Indeed ’tis so, so I will probably weave up some butterflies (suitably adapted for taquete) and other small figures over the next few days as I contemplate what to do with my taquete fabric.

Meanwhile, I have just finished dyeing another set of samples, so look for Color Wheel #3 sometime soon…

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: peacock feather shawl, taquete, tied weaves

August 31, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Peacock feathers

I spent part of yesterday browsing through the drafts on Handweaving.net, looking for inspiration.  One of the drafts looked a little like peacock feathers, and that struck me as a fruitful subject: it would turn one of the disadvantages of multiweft taquete, the fact that the colors on the bottom show through, into a major plus.  Peacock feathers are iridescent! so having small glints of the other colors showing would be perfect.

So I looked at a bunch of peacock feather images, took one, resized it, indexed the color, and then did a LOT of editing in Photoshop to produce this result:

Photoshop simulation of peacock feather design
Photoshop simulation of peacock feather design

It has seven shades: black, dark green (green + black), light green, bronze, turquoise, purple, and dark purple (purple + black).  As much as I wanted a four-shuttle weave, I just couldn’t reduce to four weft colors without losing something important.  So this is a five shuttle weave.

Then I did the extensive manipulations necessary to produce a weavable file, producing this drawdown:

peacock feather drawdown
peacock feather drawdown

And then, of course, I wove it up:

handwoven peacock feather design, in five-weft taquete
handwoven peacock feather design, in five-weft taquete

I like it, tentatively, though I will probably modify the design to eliminate the dark green.  There is very little visible difference between the dark green and the light green (I should have remembered this), so my intended feathery effect turned into a green blob.  I will instead make the black go further into the green sections, producing the desired feathery effect.

Is this not a miracle of modern software?  From idea to simulation to drawdown to woven fabric, all in just one day.

As a five-shuttle weave, it is quite slow.  So far it is coming out at 90 ppi, and about 4.8 seconds/pick, so it looks like I can weave just about 8″ per hour.  Again, time-consuming but not insurmountable – that’s 10 hours of weaving to do an 80″ shawl, about a week of work.

Next up: experiment with some variations.  I want to simulate it with thin purple stripes lengthwise between the feathers, and change the design so the feather edges are “feathered” with black rather than green/black.  I also want to experiment with using a strand of glitter either in the blue or  the purple, though I think that is probably gilding the lily.

If I like the results from that, it will be time to weave up the shawl!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: peacock feather shawl, taquete, tied weaves

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