Tien Chiu

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Seasons of Creativity

I am pleased to present, at last: Seasons of Creativity!

Seasons of Creativity
Seasons of Creativity

It’s hard to make out many details in a photo that small (the actual piece is 28″ x 63″), so I suggest clicking on the small photo to get the full-resolution photo, then zooming in.

Also, here are a few closeups:

first half of Seasons of Creativity
second half of Seasons of Creativity
second half of Seasons of Creativity

And here’s a close-up of some of the butterflies near the end:

Butterflies in Seasons of Creativity
Butterflies in Seasons of Creativity

The photos, alas, do not really capture the piece. There are subtle color changes in the background, which has speckles of deep coffee brown, then burgundy, eggplant, navy, and finally black, plus glittering rainbow flecks of whatever wefts aren’t weaving on the surface. There is golden glitter in the background on the far left, beneath the brilliant yellow leaves, and there is silver glitter in the background on the far right, beneath the iridescent and sparkly butterflies. None of this, unfortunately, is captured by the camera, though you can get a few glimmers in the close-up.

So…come to Convergence to see it! It will be there, one way or another – if it doesn’t get into the mixed-media exhibit, I’ll bring it as my piece for the teachers’ exhibit.

The official photo shoot is this weekend, and hopefully I’ll have better photos to offer after that. I’ll swap them into this blog post once they’re ready.

Meanwhile, enjoy a few time-lapse photos of the frenzied two weeks I spent weaving Seasons of Creativity (there’s a reason I wasn’t posting anything!):

70 quills of weft for Seasons of Creativity
All 2.66 miles of weft yarns for Seasons of Creativity. Four hand-painted wefts, each created from multiple strands of superfine yarns, took over 30 hours to prepare before weaving even started!
The first few inches of weaving
The first few inches of weaving. I used five shuttles through most of the piece, which took about 20 hours to weave.
leaf section of Seasons of Creativity, on the loom
Deep into the leaves. I took a new photo every time I had to reload the shuttles with a new set of quills – about every 5 inches.
Weaving the last few leaves of Seasons of Creativity
It was surprisingly depressing to weave the last few leaves of Seasons of Creativity and descend into darkness, even though I knew that the stars and butterflies were coming up soon.
Starting to weave the stars in Seasons of Creativity
The beginning of the stars, and the ascent into light and freedom.
Weaving the butterflies in Seasons of Creativity
The butterflies starting to burst forth. The first few butterflies were all green or yellow-green, and I nearly panicked when I saw that the next quill of weft was also slated to be yellow-green. I quickly swapped it out with yellow-orange to give more color variety, and all was well.
Near-final butterflies for Seasons of Creativity
Here the butterflies are getting larger, and I’m preparing to launch into the last set of butterflies. I was weaving like a maniac at this point because my friend Carla was visiting from the East Coast and I wanted to finish in time to show the piece to her!

And, of course, as soon as I finished, I pulled the piece off the loom and spread it out on the bed to take a snapshot to share with you. Which led, inevitably, to this photo:

Because every photo is better with a cat!

So apologies for the lengthy hiatus – I had to wait until I could hang it in a cat-free cat-deprived environment to shoot a photo, and those are hard to come by around here! But I hope it was worth the wait.

Seasons of Creativity

Comments

  4. Oh my,,just so beautiful, and I have no idea how you make all those colors work.
    Fantastic! Thanks for showing it to us.

    • Beautiful! I’m going to my first Convergence this year, I can’t wait to see this in person.

  6. What an amazing piece of art and creative design. Truly inspirational and so impressive. Thank you for sharing your process as well as the final piece.