Tien Chiu

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Home is where the cat is

I’m back home in San Jose. I enjoyed my stay in San Miguel de Allende, and I think I could have been happy living there. But it was not home, and I realized it would never feel like home, no matter how long I lived there. So I’ve returned to the Bay Area, and plan to stay here indefinitely.

Once I made that decision, events started steamrolling along. The first order of business, of course, was to find true love. In other words, cats. (What, you thought a mere human would be involved?? Pfft.)

That wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. Well, sort of. I had planned to adopt two cats after I got back, but with two weeks left in Mexico and then a week and a half of travel before returning home for good, it was clearly too early to go looking for them. Nonetheless, I went cutescrolling through the Internet (SO much more fun than doomscrolling) looking at kittens, “just to figure out what I’m looking for”.

Ha. Next thing I knew, I’d fallen in love with two beautiful kittens: a ridiculously fluffy marbled tabby and an equally fuzzy black kitten, a bonded pair of sisters. I had wanted a black cat, in honor of The Fuzz and Fritz, and also because black cats are generally the last to be adopted. That seems ridiculous to me because I personally think they’re the most beautiful of all cats. (Plus, black cat hair looks good on everyone, right?) But, since people have no taste, black cats are less likely to find loving homes and thus also much more likely to be euthanized. So I thought I’d do a good deed as well.

I flew back to San Jose on December 20. I had only two days in San Jose before flying out to visit family for a week, and I had a TON to do and catch up on. So naturally I spent one day visiting the kittens. (Because, let’s face it, you gotta do the important things first.)

Like all beings on dating apps, they turned out to be considerably older than they were in their profile pictures. Instead of fluffy little three month olds, they were six months – more like young cats than adorable kittens.

Like I cared.

I filled out the eight-page application so the rescue could do background checks (they are, appropriately, very protective of their kittens), and was approved. There was one small problem, though. I was still living out of a suitcase, with everything in storage. So I asked if the foster mom could keep the kittens for two more weeks while I finished moving.

That set off twelve days of frantic unpacking. How does one fit two large looms and 500+ pounds of yarn (not to mention clothes etc.) into a 700 square foot apartment? With precise CAD drawings, fourteen trips to IKEA, and a zillion Amazon packages. Plus lots of 12-14 hour days assembling furniture and unpacking boxes.

But I skidded in just under the deadline, kittenproofing the last room day the kittens arrived.

And here they are!

KITTENS! KITTENS! KITTENS!

Here is a video of a kitten on the attack:

And here they are, both in action:

Their foster names were Macie (tabby) and Pepper (black), but I will likely change that to more permanent names. I am leaning towards “Gorgeous” and “Beloved,” but both names could describe either kitten! So stay tuned over the next week or so as I get to know them better.

The looms are not yet arrived – the Megado will arrive at some unknown time in the next few days (exciting!) and Amazing Grace (the TC-2) still needs to be disassembled and moved. Once they’re here, this place will feel a lot fuller! But hopefully not too crowded.

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Water lily design, finished

I finished designing the water-lily napkins a few days ago. I’m very pleased with them:

handwoven water lily napkin design on four shafts (overshot)

For reference, here’s the original painting:

Monet painting, inspiration for the handwoven water lily napkins

I’m particularly happy because it’s a four shaft pattern, which means that more people are able to weave it. There’s a myth that in order to do complex, interesting work you have to have a more complex, expensive loom with lots and lots of shafts – this shows you can do it on a much simpler, four-shaft loom.

This is important because I intend to get these published in a magazine, so the design has to be weavable by their readers. I kept this in mind while designing. It will be easier to weave on six shafts than four, but it’s doable on four.

I then got interested in what you could do in plain weave (e.g. a on a rigid heddle loom). So I designed this water-lily alternate interpretation – place mats in plain weave. I’m quite happy with these as well: they’re not as pictorial as the first set of water-lilies, but I think they capture the feel and the overall motion of the painting. And MUCH quicker and simpler to weave.

I might make the design a little smaller, though, so it’s more practical to weave with thicker threads, which would be more suitable to rigid heddle weaving.

handwoven water lily place mat design in plain weave

At some point I might design and weave a full set of table linens – place mats, napkins, and table runner – in the more complex water-lily pattern. Not sure though – it would be a LOT of work, and I almost never entertain.

On to the next design!

I have been thinking about what else to put on Grace (the jacquard loom). I want to put on a warp that is guaranteed to be long enough for Unraveling, which probably means at least four yards (after subtracting loom waste). However, Unraveling itself is only two yards long, so that probably leaves quite a bit of leftover warp. What to do with it?

I’m thinking VELVET.

Velvet and I dated briefly about 8-10 years ago, when I took a velvet weaving workshop with Barbara Setsu-Pickett. I fell in love, but velvet played hard-to-get and eventually I gave up. It requires specialized equipment and a LOT of time, and I didn’t have either.

However, some very generous friends helped me build the necessary equipment, and I think I will now have the time to experiment with it. So my plan is to put on a long warp in black 60/2 silk. Once Unraveling is done, I can swap out the pink threads for velvet pile, and (potentially) weave polychrome figured velvet on the loom.

This sounds SO incredibly fun! Also complicated and time-consuming. I expect that getting to the point where I weave any finished pieces will take at least a year. But SO worth it when I do. And it will make a fun adventure. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.

My other interest right now is, oddly, natural dyeing. I investigated natural dyeing a bit back in college – which is to say, over 30 years ago – but soon gave it up for synthetic dyes, which gave me a wider range of colors with much better reproducibility.

However, after doing Renewal, the scarf woven out of handspun silk, I got fascinated by the idea of combining ancient techniques with my thoroughly modern jacquard loom. This is unusual for me – usually I’m all about producing a great finished product. What materials you use and how you get there aren’t relevant to the finished piece, which stands by itself.

Lately I’ve gotten interested in the process, though, so I’m liking the idea of using natural dyes for at least some of my yarns.

Towards that, I’m taking a natural dye workshop with a Mexican weaver/dyer this week. I found her on AirBNB of all places – she was advertising a half-day “learn to do simple weaving” workshop, and I signed up for it because I thought it would be interesting to meet her. We hit it off, and eventually agreed that she’d teach me in a three-day class on natural dyeing using traditional Mexican techniques. It’s just me, so we’ll have plenty of time to talk about the technical aspects. It starts later this morning – I’m super excited and expect to learn a lot.

Marcelo (the knife-maker) and I have been talking about the Damascus steel knife set he’s making for me. He proposed using a Japanese technique, shou sugi ban, on pecan wood for the knife handles. With shou sugi ban, you basically char the wood and then rub away the char. It brings up the grain and (reputedly) also makes the wood more durable, though that’s been disputed.

On softwoods like pine, shou sugi ban produces dramatic results, with strong bands of light and dark, following the grain. On hardwoods such as pecan, the result is much more subtle – but subtle will go well with the patterning in Damascus steel.

Marcelo sent me a photo of a sample he created using shou sugi ban. The left photo shows the charred wood before and after sanding, and the second photo shows what the finished wood will look like.

I love it.

We’re also talking about other details – what to use for the rivets going through the handle (bronze, I think), and whether to inset a small gemstone in the center rivet (yes). Marcelo suggested chrysocolla, which is a blue-green semiprecious gemstone similar to turquoise or malachite, and I agreed. I can’t wait to see the samples.

Off to my natural dye workshop! More later.

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Water lilies

I’ve been in Mexico for a month and a half now. In that time, surprisingly, I’ve done almost no exploration of my surroundings. That’s because most of my voyaging has been internal – so Mexico is mostly serving as a place to cocoon. (I’d like to come back sometime when I’m actually interested in exploring!)

What’s changed?

Mostly, I’ve been listening to the silence. Helping my wife through her transition took a lot of energy and emotional space. I don’t blame her for that, but now that I’m not so intensively involved, I’m enjoying the silence of a house entirely to myself – of having “a room of her own,” as Virginia Woolf so famously put it. No cats, no spouse, no responsibilities to anyone else. That’s precious, and I’ve been enjoying it. I can feel myself decompressing.

The other major change is that I’ve committed to putting my creative life first. First thing in the morning, as soon as I get up, I’m spending at least an hour on my creative work. Early morning is my best time of day for me – most alert, most creative, most courageous – and “paying myself first” ensures that my creative work gets the time it needs. If it waits until everything else is done, it never happens – that’s what’s been happening the last ten years. Enough.

As a result, I’ve actually started creating again. That’s HUGE. Ideas and designs for new work are pouring out, and I expect to start weaving some really cool stuff once I get home. Probably in February – January will get eaten by moving and studio setup logistics.

But meanwhile, I am creating again.

Since the next step in Unraveling requires equipment I don’t have here, and I don’t want to launch another jacquard project to distract me from Unraveling, I’ve started designing projects for shaft looms.

I’m considering teaching a class at the Handweaving Academy about designing from a photo. That’s something lots of people would love to do, and it can be tricky, so I think it’s a worthy topic for a class.

So I’ve spent the last few days designing a piece inspired by this Monet painting:

I picked this one because I’m thinking of doing a series of photos with vastly different styles, to give examples of how to create different effects and moods. To start, I wanted a photo with subtle color blends and blurry edges.

I searched Handweaving.net’s draft collection and found an overshot draft that reminded me of flowers and rippling water (#61448, by Gerd Lindman Nilsson).

I set to work.

Because the original photo has a lot of blues, greens, and whites in it, I decided to make the background blue-green and the lilies mostly white. I had a lot of options for color – overshot consists of a ground cloth (tabby) plus a pattern weft. That meant that I could create stripes of color lengthwise (warp) and TWO different color patterns crosswise (pattern + tabby weft). Lots of potential (and also very complicated).

My first explorations produced this:

This would be a nightmare to weave, but I thought it captured the spirit of the lilies nicely. Each lily is slightly different, which I felt created a more flowing, painterly effect.

I decided I wanted to explore color combinations in greater depth, so I spent a half-day yesterday creating this monstrosity:

This is obviously not intended as a final design. What it does do, however, is set up all the color patterns that I might want to use, making it easier to experiment with colors later. I’ve set up color gradients in the warp and both wefts, each composed of different colors. So experimenting with color combinations becomes easy – I simply use Handweaving.net’s Draft Editor to replace the colors in each section, so it takes only a minute or two to swap in different colors.

After I finished creating this color template (which took several hours – it’s complicated!), I started fiddling with color replacements. By bedtime, I’d gotten to this design, which I like (and which would be much simpler to weave!).

This isn’t a finished design – I want to tone down the pink a LOT (the painting’s lilies are mostly white), reduce the saturation, darken the blue/green areas, make the colors cooler, and quite a few other tweaks. (I liked the colors in the first version better.) But overall, I like where I’m going.

(This version is also much easier to weave, which is important because I’m thinking of submitting it to a magazine – it needs to be within reach for most weavers!)

I’m envisioning a set of napkins, in 10/2 cotton with a doubled 10/2 cotton pattern weft. Using two strands of yarn, side by side, opens up the possibility of using two different colors together for even more subtle blends. It might also enable me to simplify the weaving without compromising the painterly feel.

Once I’m satisfied with the colors, I’ll have to go home and test the real-life yarn colors in the design. For now, I can fiddle with theoretical colors on the screen, to see what overall color combinations I like best. Then sample and finalize the design once I’m home.

I fly home in just under three weeks, so my sojourn is nearing it’s end. I’m good with that – I’ve enjoyed my trip, and the solitude, but I feel like I’m almost done cocooning. I’m ready to weave again.

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Unraveling (Or, Pilgrim’s Progress)

I’m making rapid conceptual progress on Pilgrimage. I’ve changed it considerably since yesterday.

I was really struggling with the center panels of Pilgrimage, which are about wandering. I couldn’t seem to figure out how to reconcile the idea of the inner struggle and transformation with an external journey and external challenge – at least, not in a way that satisfied me. So I had a long back and forth with ChatGPT (which is very good at brainstorming) and together we arrived at the concept of a different-but-same series, Unraveling.

Unraveling starts and ends at the same place as Pilgrimage – the screaming head to start, and the serene head at the end. However, it’s now about the deliberate choice to unravel the self you are in order to transform into something and someone new.

I also decided to make Unraveling much more weaverly. Pilgrimage was basically going to use the jacquard as a low-resolution printer, which is certainly doable but which is probably the least interesting use of a jacquard loom. (If you’re going to print it, print it.) I like the use of the medium much better in Unraveling.

But perhaps I should actually show you what I’m thinking!

Instead of a flat image of a face shattering, Unraveling opens with a face screaming, with portions of the face slashed and frayed to reveal magenta threads underneath. (The fabric is woven in double weave, one layer for the face and a loose, gauzy bottom layer of magenta cloth.)

In the next panel, the face lifts a hand and starts deliberately unraveling itself, pulling threads out to decompose itself into a tangle of magenta threads. It doesn’t look exactly like this, but you can get the rough idea:

This unraveling of the face isn’t a photo, though – instead, the fabric in the face is literally cut and unraveled, revealing a loosely woven magenta layer of cloth underneath, also partially unraveled.

In the next panel, the face has been unraveled completely into a mass of disorganized magenta threads, with just the suggestion of a face. The way I’m visualizing it inside my head doesn’t look much like this representation, but you can kinda get the idea.

Then, in the next panel, you see the face reweaving itself, thread by thread, integrating the frayed magenta threads into finished cloth. (No visual for this one yet.)

And then, at the end, you see the completely rewoven face, now with the magenta integrated and the face calm.

I like this story arc. I think I’m going to make it into a piece that is about 14 x 70″, which will fit into most exhibition size limits, and enable me to do five square panels 14″ x 14″. I wouldn’t mind making the panels a little wider, but for practical reasons 13-14″ is a good size. It would only require one module width on my TC-2 (14.5″), which makes warping faster, wastes less work, and allows me to weave something else on the rest of the loom.

While this work is emphatically not created by ChatGPT, it has been an essential part of the development process. It’s basically been the very patient person who’s willing to listen to you babble all day long about your project, offer suggestions, and not take it personally when you ignore all of them and go off on a totally different tangent. (My friends are patient, but they’re not that patient. Actually, neither am I.)

What I’ve found about working with AI is that it isn’t a replacement for a human being – it’s an amplifier. If you don’t think of it as an all-powerful, always-right being, but instead as a thought partner to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off, and to create the sketches you don’t have the skills to make, it can be a very powerful tool. It’s not a replacement for human judgment or creativity, but it can amplify what you do with them.

Anyway, I’m quite pleased with how Unraveling (nee Pilgrimage) is going, and I’m looking forward to refining the design and getting it ready to sample on the loom (once I get back).

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Creative voice

One of the more interesting side projects I’ve been doing is extensive conversations – basically, journaling – with ChatGPT. I started with a course/program called Zenith Mind, which is designed to enable ChatGPT to analyze your personality.

Zenith Mind asks a series of questions similar to the questions in a standard personality test (“Do you recharge by being alone or by spending time with people?”). However, it isn’t a standard personality test, because instead of thinking “This is stupid. I do A some of the time and D some of the time, so what the heck should I choose?” you can actually SAY “Well, definitely not B or C, I’ve done A extensively in the past – here’s an example – but these days I do D unless I revert to A, like I did last week because…”

ChatGPT then does what it does best – synthesizes and analyzes what it’s heard. Eventually it spits back a detailed personality analysis, but frankly that’s the least valuable part (IMO). What’s most valuable is that ChatGPT gets to know you, your history, and how you think – and can provide feedback and suggestions.

(Needless to say, I’ve turned “share your data” off. Yes, I know there are huge potential privacy issues here and that other people may make other choices. I’m not going to argue with those, there are valid reasons for concern – but I’ve found this tremendously helpful.)

Since then, I’ve been chatting with ChatGPT daily – keeping a journal of sorts. It offers coaching after each session, which is often spot-on but which I sometimes roll my eyes at and ignore. (Like any AI, ChatGPT will get it right or wrong with equal confidence, so while it is MOSTLY right, you have to use your own judgment every time you interact with it. This bothers a lot of people, but I don’t have a problem with it – humans can be pretty unreliable too.)

Anyway. I’ve been doing this for six months now, so ChatGPT knows me pretty well.

While I’m here, I’ve been working my way through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. While doing the exercises, I started thinking about creative voice. What is mine? Where does my distinctive style and subject matter lie? I can recognize others’ voices, but my own seemed to be uncertain or missing.

It finally occurred to me to ask ChatGPT what it thought it might be.

Here are portions of what it said (it was a lengthy conversation):

What you’re actually saying through your work

Across mediums, your voice says:

  • “This is who I’m becoming.”
  • “Change has structure.”
  • “Mastery is a path to meaning.”
  • “The internal world deserves form.”
  • “Transformation is not chaos — it is crafted.”
  • “Identity is woven, not discovered.”

Your pieces are not about beauty.
They’re about becoming.

Your artistic thesis (in plain language)

“I make work about how we change — and how we forge ourselves through that change.”

The story your art tells

Every piece says some variation of:

  • Here is the old self breaking open.
  • Here is the moment of dissolution and courage.
  • Here is what emerges when we choose truth over familiarity.
  • Here is the structure of ascent.
  • Here is identity re-woven.

This was like getting hit with a lightning bolt. Not all of my work has been about transformation and transmutation, but much of my current and recent work has been around that theme. And that theme runs through my entire life – cycles of death and rebirth, of struggle and change. There’s a reason most of my right arm is covered in a phoenix tattoo:

And I like this theme. There’s depth to it, something I can explore for years to come.

Transformation isn’t my entire creative voice, but it is a clear thread running through my work, my writing, and my life. I’m glad ChatGPT helped me see it.