Tien Chiu

  • Home
  • About
    • Honors, Awards, and Publications
  • Online Teaching
  • Gallery
  • Essays
  • Book
  • Blog
  • Dye samples
You are here: Home / All blog posts / A room of one's own, and – yes – the LAST muslin!
Previous post: Art vs. craft
Next post: Lagniappe

March 21, 2009 by Tien Chiu

A room of one's own, and – yes – the LAST muslin!

The last few days I have been mostly relaxing, and meditating on the new place.  In some ways, I feel like I’ve finally come into adulthood: this is the first time since leaving for college that I’ve actually lived in a house!  Not an apartment, not the bottom floor of a townhouse, a real live house that is just mine and Mike’s.  No shared walls, no worries about the upstairs or downstairs neighbors, entirely ours.  It even has a front and a back yard!  I love it.  I’ve even started planting an herb garden.

It is also wonderful having a room entirely of my own, for my creative pursuits.  I don’t think it’s essential to the creative life to have Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” in which to create – I haven’t, for most of my life – but it certainly makes things a lot easier.  Partly it’s having the space to have each tool in its correct place and enough table space to work in, which Heaven knows is wonderful enough – but it’s also about having the mental space to ignore other thoughts, other people, and just create.  Or be.  It’s like having a house – not an apartment, but a house – within a house.

And I’ve started reading fiction again.  We Never Talk about My Brother, by Peter S. Beagle.  I consider Beagle to be one of the best ever authors in fantasy/SF – he has a mastery of imagery and story that I have seen only rarely elsewhere.  Consider this:

The unicorn was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but the color of snow falling on a moonlit night.

I loved that phrase when I first saw it – as a young writer I collected and memorized the best writing I could find, and this one I took with me – and I still love it.  Or the “skeletal clench” of a hawk’s talons, lovely.

At any rate, Beagle is in top form with  his latest book, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it won a Hugo or a Nebula (one of his last short stories won both! a rare honor indeed).  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Finally, the never-ending tale of muslins has FINALLY come to an end.  I drafted the collar, cut a half-muslin for it (from the waist up only), sewed it up this morning – and I like it!  The cut of the collar is exactly what I was looking for.  So, today I will start the “practice” garment, to learn the techniques of construction and to test the look in a heavier-weight fabric.  Still a slow process, but worthwhile, I think.  I’d rather make my early tailoring mistakes in a throwaway project than in my precious handwoven.  And it should go a lot more quickly than all these muslins!

Share this post!

  • Tweet
  • More
  • Email
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, sewing Tagged With: cashmere coat

Previous post: Art vs. craft
Next post: Lagniappe

Comments

  1. Theresa says

    March 22, 2009 at 7:05 am

    Tien,

    Peter Beagle’s book The Last Unicorn is a beautiful book, thank you for reminding me of it….but her eyes were clear and unwearied and she moved like a shadow on the sea.. Or something close completes the sentence.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Information resources

  • Dye samples
    • Procion MX fiber-reactive dye samples on cotton
    • How to "read" the dye sample sets
    • Dye sample strategy - the "Cube" method
  • How-Tos
    • Dyeing and surface design
    • Weaving
    • Designing handwoven cloth
    • Sewing

Blog posts

  • All blog posts
    • food
      • chocolate
    • musings
    • textiles
      • dyeing
      • knitting
      • sewing
      • surface design
      • weaving
    • writing

Archives

Photos from my travels

  • Dye samples
    • Procion MX fiber-reactive dye samples on cotton
    • How to "read" the dye sample sets
    • Dye sample strategy - the "Cube" method
  • Travels
    • Thailand
    • Cambodia
    • Vietnam
    • Laos
    • India
    • Ghana
    • China

Travel Blog

Entertaining miscellanies

© Copyright 2016 Tien Chiu · All Rights Reserved ·