Tien Chiu

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A new definition of "forever"

The Joy of Cooking, which is one of the most entertaining cookbooks ever written, defines eternity as “a ham and two people”.  But I found a new version today, when (you guessed it!) my 120/2 silk finally arrived!

Unfortunately, it arrived on only two cones, one of 500g and one of 1500g.  This meant I couldn’t wind the warp straight off multiple cones: given the unequal sizes, the tension would be different on the strands coming off each cone.  I also wanted to wind with at least four threads at a time (at 96 ends per inch, this would be a real timesaver).

What to do?

Well, I whipped out my trusty Silver Needles electric conewinder, ran the yarn through a tension box to improve the tension, and started the cone winding.

And winding.

And winding.

It’s now been about an hour and a half since I started, and the conewinder, laboring valiantly, has wound off…about 100g.  In other words, about 2/5 of a single cone.  A little math says that winding off 1 kg onto four cones of 250g apiece will take about 15 hours, or almost an entire dawn-to-dusk day.  Thank GOODNESS I don’t have to do it by hand!

The Silver Needles electric conewinder, by the way, is not designed for this kind of load.  The plastic housing is largely unventilated, and while there’s a small fan inside the housing, it’s way too small to cool the motor.  So I have removed the housing and pointed a household fan at the motor.  This seems to be working pretty well.

And, for those who like pretty pictures, here is the header image for my new website:

header image

Take a look at it close up; there’s a lot of detail missing from the thumbnail.  The fabric, of course, is that marvelous study in iridescence, and I really like the way it’s rumpled.

Of course, it two hours of reading up on CSS and PHP to get the right code into the right libraries to display that header image on the new website, but I’m starting to understand how this WordPress theme “thinks”, so I’m content for now.

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Split attention

So much to do, so little time!

I had a wonderful time at Sandra’s – her DH, Mike, repaired my warp beam and made an adapter that will allow me to wind cones on my double-ended AVL bobbin winder, and Sandra and I talked a lot about weaving and interleaved network drafted threadings.  She does beautiful work, some of it holographic, with interleaved threadings, and I find it extremely exciting.  I must explore this! – well, AFTER the dress is complete.

Sandra also showed me her electric skeinwinder – essentially, a conventional skeinwinder with a flywheel attached, driven by a sewing machine motor at the base of the device.  A magnetic counter counts revolutions.  I’d post a photo but I can’t currently locate the gizmo that will let me plug my little portable camera’s memory card into the computer.  Maybe in a little bit.

This is an extremely neat gadget, and one I’d like to try making sometime – but for now, the skeinwinder on my spinning wheel will work just fine.  It’s great, it’s foot-driven, and I can easily estimate weight of the yarn on the skein by sticking the cone I’m winding from on a scale at the beginning, then subtracting the weight at any given point from the original weight to give the amount of yarn wound off.  I also don’t have to store One More Thing, which is extremely useful since my studio is looking pretty crammed right now.  (Where on earth did I store everything back when I was working on the dining room table???)

Needless to say, as soon as I got home I tucked my properly-adjusted warp beam into the loom, leaped for the AVL warping wheel, and started winding on a new warp, this one of white mohair.  Sandra had given me lots of useful tips for working with the warping wheel – run the yarn through a tension box on its way onto the wheel (for even tension in winding), use plastic tubing to guide the yarn into the sectional hoops when winding onto the beam, and lots of other helpful stuff – and it was a breeze.  I really think most of my woes were caused by (a) the misalignment of the sectional hoops, and (b) having the tension set WAY too low on the warping wheel as I wound each section onto the beam.

At any rate, I wound on a 19″ wide, 9-yard warp of fine white mohair this morning, now sitting on the beam ready for threading. It went on beautifully – of course, the proof will be how it weaves up!  I can’t wait to find out.

I might have gotten the warp on earlier, but I spent the first three hours of my day reading up on WordPress and realizing just what a Herculean effort I’ve let myself in for, in the website redesign.  It’s not that the task is complicated; it could probably be done by a competent web developer in about a day and a half.  However, I’m not a full-time web developer!  I have a decent idea of HTML and a hazy idea of CSS and a very limited understanding of PHP, so I’m having to puzzle it out bit by bit.  I did locate a theme that is very powerful (low on pretty graphics, high on customizability) and have installed it.  I also found a lot of great info on theme design at http://themeshaper.com – if you’re into WordPress, and want to customize it, this is a great resource.

I have, however, managed to do the really important thing: I have created my own favicon for the new webpage!  It’s a simple orange and black tiger-striped design.  (I was going to do something weaving-related, but there’s only so much you can do in a 16 x 16 pixel area.)  I have also created the image header for my website, but still need to massage it a bit before it’s ready for prime time.  I also have to figure out how to get it to display properly in the header, which will require a dive into my CSS books and the WordPress documentation.

The other thing I’ve been doing, which is singularly unexciting, is doing online coursework to renew my PMP (Project Management Professional) certification.  This particular class is completely useless, an epithet I might use to describe the PMP certification as well, though it does decorate a resume nicely.  It’s basically memorizing jargon out of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) and spouting it back.  Is there any real value in memorizing what the risk management planning process is and how it differs from the risk management control assessment?

Well, regardless, it is a good certification to have, so I’m working my way through it.  This is what I get for leaving my continuing education requirement to the last minute, I guess.

Tonight is a guild meeting, so I will be bringing the collapse weave shawl and some of my other recent stuff to show.  I’m also going up to visit Blossom, who’s a new production weaver documenting his journey into professional weaving at his blog here.

Finally, I’ve decided to do some more dyeing.  The plan is to create a full color range of graduated colors in 60/2 silk – a smooth color range going all the way around the color wheel.  As you may recall from my previous color work, this is a bit daunting – it took me 29 skeins just to get from fuchsia to turquoise – and also requires quite a bit of yarn.  However, since I bought 6 kg of 60/2 silk back when I thought I would use it for the wedding dress, I should have enough to do 50-gram skeins in 120 colors, which should get me all the way around the color wheel with room to spare.

I want to do this while I’m unemployed because it’s fairly time-consuming, and also because you have to be around for a long chunk of time to watch the dye-pots.  It takes 1.5 hours to do a fiber-reactive dyebath using my methods, and I have to be stirring the dyepots every 15 minutes during that time.  Even though I can do six or seven dyepots at once using mason jars in a hot water bath, 120 colors will still take a loooong time to do.

The last thing I want to do is to dye up some sample sets using Jacquard acid dyes.  I recently purchased about 30 8 oz containers of Jacquard acid dyes at a yard sale, and before I can really work with those dyes I’ll need to know what colors they yield, and get some idea of how the colors mix together.  So I will be doing samples with those as well.

Whew!  So many things to do, so little time.  And I thought being unemployed was going to be RELAXING!

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Web redesign excitement!

Sandra and I stumbled across the new CNCH website yesterday (it’s gorgeous by the way), and it inspired me to TOTALLY rethink my concept for my website.  I had been thinking about using WordPress for a set of static pages, but their presentation is fresh (totally different from the old site) and totally cool.  Now I’m thinking about ways to add rotating content, put new content at the top, highlight recent work and work in progress, and a WHOLE lot of other stuff.  And (after investigating other options) I’m definitely going to be using WordPress…it’s simple to use, relatively easy to edit, and a lot more friendly to the web designer/nontechnical user than Drupal.

I was so excited, in fact, that I woke up at 2am and couldn’t get back to sleep until I had scrawled down some of my ideas on paper.  Sadly, no scanner, so I can’t put it into the computer, but here is a sampling of what I intend to do:

  • Organize in 7-8 sections with a link to each section at the top of the page
  • Left-hand context sensitive menu in each section with links to each section’s content
  • Homepage content contains:
    • Photo of most recently completed work, with link to that work’s page
    • Photo of works in progress, with teaser explanation and link to that piece’s page
    • Teaser for most recent blog entry
    • Random photo of previously completed work, linking to that piece’s page
  • Each piece will have a page with explanatory text, photos, links to blog entries about that piece, etc.
  • Image galleries with optional slideshows

Now, of course, I have to go through the list of WordPress plugins and see which of those items can be done with existing plugins.  Needless to say, I will be adapting requirements around what is achievable.

This is a huge undertaking, and I wouldn’t dare try it at all, but the Scrum framework gives me the option of breaking it down into smaller, more manageable bits, so I’m just looking at a series of small hills rather than a giant mountain.  The first step will be to get the basic homepage put together, which means selecting a theme (I’m leaning towards Atahualpa, as it looks both popular and very flexible) and starting to research how to get various types of content to display in WordPress.

A long slog, but who knows?  It might pan out, and then I’d get a new website.  And that would be very cool indeed.

I’ll be building the new website at my alternate URL, tienchiu . com, for those who feel like tracking the progress.  Up until now it’s simply pointed at travelingtiger.com, but it’s a nice place to build the new site.  It will also give me the opportunity to work with a new hosting provider, Dreamhost – which hopefully will be more friendly and reliable than Omnis.com, my current hosting provider (have been unhappy for awhile and would NEVER work with them again).

It’s funny – a lot of my thoughts on the design have been heavily influenced by Weavolution.  I didn’t think that Weavolution design was going to be so applicable to other things, but looking back on it, it’s amazing how much I learned about web design along the way.

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Warp and web design

I spent most of yesterday struggling with a nightmare warp – a sticky alpaca/wool (?) mystery yarn in my stash that I had decided to use up in a differential shrinkage project.  (Astonishingly, I own very few shrinkable yarns – it’s mostly silk and cashmere – so this odd lot was all I had in the right size.)  I wound the warp and decided to dye it after winding it, which might have contributed to the problem, but (whatever the cause) the warp wound up being unbelievably sticky.  I couldn’t pull the lease sticks through it at all – I had to clear it by hand every inch of the way, picking off little bits of fuzz every two or three inches.  For six yards.

In retrospect, of course, I probably should have abandoned it and gone on to the next warp, but you know how it is when you’re deep in a project – you don’t want to throw it away.  So I persevered, and beamed it on in about six hours (!).  However, after all that effort, I needed a break from weaving.  What to do?

Well, faithful readers may recall that I had planned to revamp my website about a year ago.  I had hired a graphic designer and redone the “look” of the site, hand-coded the page templates in HTML/CSS, and then paid a friend to do the remaining work for me.  She flaked out on me, and I gave up.

Fast-forward to the present.  I’m unemployed, I have some free time, and I want to sharpen my Web design skills/resume.  I don’t want to create static pages – I want to use a content management system (because it will make maintenance and future uploads easier) instead.

So I did some research, and have decided to use WordPress to manage my website.  This may sound a little odd since its primary application is blogging, but I think it would suffice for a relatively simply structured website, which mine is.  (WordPress actually IS a content management system, just a fairly specialized one.)  I’m also familiar with WordPress, and understand its basic structure, and it’s easier to maintain than Drupal.  So WordPress it is.

The next question is how to approach it.  I have a BIG website.  In fact, the prospect of having to migrate all the pages, photos, etc. is pretty daunting; that’s where I got stuck last time.  However, the Agile methodology that I was just studying seems like a lifesaver.  Agile emphasizes “sprints”, or short development cycles each of which produces a usable result.  In other words, one doesn’t start by doing all the templates, and then getting bogged down in lots of mindless migration work.  Instead, one starts by doing a small component of the site (say, the front page), and then breaks the work down into chunks, each of which is functional and can be used.  This appeals to me since it means I’ll be able to see progress as I go, which in turn increases the likelihood that I will actually finish the process.

So that is the approach I am using.  Since I just learned how to apply Agile/Scrum, I need to practice the techniques on something to sharpen my skills, so I am going to spend some time setting that up Scrum-style and getting it clear in my head.

I am starting to feel a bit over-burdened with projects – the weaving itself is a full-time project, and then I have a few other things that will need to be done in the next week or two – but I have faith that it will all muddle out in the end.

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Image gallery

I spent part of yesterday and today figuring out how to use the image gallery tool I just bought: SlideShowPro and SlideShowPro Director. It’s not 100% of everything I want, but it’s pretty good, and very configurable.  More to the point, it saves me from having to either relearn Flash/Actionscript or hire a Flash developer to make a video player; and at $60 for the two programs, that’s a real steal.

I spent this morning tinkering around with templates and appearance, and have got a mockup here. (Don’t expect it to be up indefinitely; once I’m done messing around with it I’m going to take it down, so if the link doesn’t load, that’s why.) I’m still playing with it, but I’m fairly happy with the proportions, placement, color, etc.

That said, I haven’t decided yet whether to use it for everything. Definitely for the chocolate feet story, probably for the travel photos, but I think probably not for the crafts pages – for those I will make HTML galleries not unlike the ones I originally made.  Haven’t decided yet.  So much to play with, so little time!

At any rate, I have the framework in place, and later on I can hire someone to fill in the galleries for me.

I have received the bead patterns from BeAdInfinitum, along with a kit for the Lotus Beaded Bead, and will be tackling that one today or tomorrow.

But meanwhile, I promised Mike we’d go on a bike ride today, so off to that!