Tien Chiu

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Back at (creative) work

I finished my hand-dyed bed linens, and they are fantastic! Here are the sheets:

And here is the blanket (plus Pepper the Professional Photobomber!):

Here’s what it looks like with the sheets turned properly down:

I LOVE it!

I’m planning on doing a second set of sheets, this one in blues and greens to match the blanket. More pictures once those are done! I may wind up mixing the sheet sets to have one blue sheet and one orange sheet in each set. Or maybe not. Stay tuned!

I’ve also gotten started on weaving stuff. (FINALLY!) You may or may not recall the series I’m working on, Unraveling. It’s a series of five images that starts with a woman screaming, woven in black and white, with the fabric slashed and frayed to reveal a layer of magenta cloth beneath the surface. Here’s the image I’m planning to weave – obviously it doesn’t have the double weave bottom layer or the slashes in it yet, but those are coming!

In the next frame, she reaches up a hand to her face and begins unraveling the frayed cloth, revealing a magenta mass of threads underneath. Here’s an “artist’s concept” (as they say) of what that might look like.

The next frame shows her as an unraveled mess of magenta thread, very loosely arranged in the shape of a face:

In the next frame, she is starting to put herself back together: a cocoon with a serene face

And, finally, the last frame shows her serene, with the magenta integrated, a single layer of cloth.

I handspun 1800 yards of superfine (the size of sewing thread) thread on a drop spindle while I was in Mexico, and will be using it in the magenta layer. It’s the “through line,” literally the thread that runs through the entire piece. It’s magenta because, on our last day in the old house, I arrived just before dawn to find a beautiful magenta glow in the sky over the home we were leaving behind:

After discussing the matter with Claude and doing some Googling for myself, I think those must have been the Northern Lights – the color is right and I can’t think of any other explanation. But it is practically unheard of to see the Northern Lights in the Bay Area, and to have that light up the sky on the last day in our old home? I took it as an omen, and I carried it with me all through my travels to Mexico. I literally spun it into a thread of continuity and contemplation:

I haven’t been able to work on the fabric design because I’ve had equipment issues (my pen display broke), but I should be able to start by the end of the week.

That may be getting ahead of myself, though. I need to set up the jacquard loom before I start weaving, and that’s gonna take a while. I have 1,320 heddles to thread, then debug (finding and fixing all the mistakes), before I can weave. I also want to replace 1,100 heddles with more durable ones. Finally, I need to wind and beam the warp for the project before I start threading. That’s a lot of infrastructure work, but it needs doing. And if you have to do something long and tedious, best to start right away. So I began winding the warp this afternoon. Forward ho!

The Megado? I have a project in mind for her, but I can’t finish designing it until I get that pen display. Soon, I hope!

By the way, I have decided to christen the Megado “Lady Lovelace” (after Ada Lovelace, of course). My jacquard loom is “Amazing Grace” (after pioneering software legend Grace Hopper). So now I have Lady Lovelace and Amazing Grace – which really ought to be the name of a rock duo. (Think I can get the Indigo Girls to change their name? 😉 )

And, of course, because no blog post would be complete without kittens, here are Nutmeg and Pepper, training for the North American Mixed Martial Arts championships! (All in fun – they chase each other all over the house almost every day, and there’s never any hissing. And all that kitten energy! They’re so much fun to watch.)

And all snuggled up afterwards.

They’re just over nine months now, and weigh as much as adult cats, so perhaps I should stop calling them kittens. But honestly? They’ll always be kittens to me.

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Tiger tattoo

I’m back from Australia! and the tattoo has healed up nicely. Forest did a FANTASTIC job!

Here are some pictures of the tattoo in progress (it was fun to watch it grow!):

And here it is fully healed:

TOTALLY worth a trip to Australia.

My friend Lieven took these beautiful portraits of me, featuring both tattoos:

I LOVE them – the pictures AND the tattoos!

What have I been up to since I got back? A lot more unpacking and organization. (If I had a dime for every time I’ve said “I think I’m almost unpacked!” I’d be retired and water skiing in the Caribbean right now.)

But also some fun stuff. I tie-dyed a queen-sized blanket for my bed earlier this week, plus two throws for my ex-wife. They are midway through the rinse process, but I’ll post pix once they’re out.

And of course there are KITTENS!! Here they are with their latest toy: a puzzle feeder.

Actually they have FOUR puzzle feeders, because they enjoy them so much. It’s a pleasure to see how excited they get when I fill them with kibble and cat treats – and it gives them something to play with during the day. I have a few more puzzle feeders up my sleeve for when they get bored with these.

Because my place is small, and I want to give them the maximum amount of space, I’ve installed cat wall furniture wherever possible. I also turned the back hallway into a kitten playground:

They LOVE crumpled-up packing paper. So, I’m actually stocking the stuff so that when a batch of packing-paper wears out, I can replace it with nice, fresh packing paper. There is a lot of CRASH! CRASH! PA-THUD! going on these days as they romp around in it. And lots of cat toys, of course.

They may not be the most spoiled cats ever, but not for lack of human effort. 🙂

Here’s a pic of Nutmeg (nee Macie) curled up in her favorite basket:

And Pepper, perched on her human:

They’re now about 10 months old, and pretty close to full-grown cats. They’ll grow maybe another 10% from here and then settle into their adult weights.

I am, obviously, completely gaga over them and doing my best to keep them happy, engaged, and entertained. They get a play session every morning, and if they manage to grab the toy any time during the rest of the day, they get another play session right then.

Which leads to shenanigans whenever I sit down to eat:

(Caption: When She Thinks Mom Isn’t Looking)

We both like the game, though. As typical with most cat-human interactions, the cat wins most of the time, so we both get to have fun!

That’s it for today! More once I get those tie-dyes rinsed out and (finally!) get started on weaving.

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Capstone

Good heavens. Has it really been six weeks? That is approximately 36.3 years in Tien-time. So let’s catch you up quickly:

Looms: Unpacked, moved, and reassembled. Amazing Grace (my TC-2 loom), being the queen of the household, has the bedroom to herself; Lady Lovelace (my brand-new Megado) and I are shacking it up in the living room. I haven’t had time to do anything with either loom – most of the past six weeks has been spent unpacking and assembling looms.

But not all. Other interesting things are happening as well, most notably that I’m currently in a plane above the South Pacific, heading to Australia to get a tattoo.

Well, yes, I suppose that is just about what you’d expect from me.

To explain a little more:

Ever since I got a phoenix tattoo on my right arm (after my mother passed away, I left high-tech to teach weaving, and my then-husband came out as transgender), I’ve wanted a tiger on the left arm. I’ve had an affinity for tigers for quite some time – my original website, started in 2003, was at travelingtiger.com – but I didn’t feel the idea had quite gelled enough to manifest yet. I also didn’t feel that I had “earned it” yet – a tattoo of that significance should be a celebration, a capstone to some achievement or significant event, rather than something to just go out and get one day after dinner.

Well. After the past year of upheaval – the end of a 20-year relationship/15-year marriage, selling the house we’d lived in for over a decade, cocooning in Mexico for three months, and finally deciding to move back to San Jose to start over – I think I’ve earned another tattoo.

I didn’t want just a plain tiger, though. There are lots of “regular” tiger tattoos in the world, and I wanted something special – something unique and with deep personal significance.

So I had a long conversation with ChatGPT about what this tattoo might look like, and we came up with this (two slightly different ideas of the same concept)

Tiger tattoo, AI-generated

The tiger is walking from the spirit world into our world, and represents strength, confidence, and self-control – powerful but not aggressive. The panther is the tiger’s Jungian shadow-self, following a few steps behind (as the shadow-self always does). As the tiger walks through the spirit veil, the panther is just visible, beginning to manifest, behind.

Together, they are about finding and manifesting your power, and integrating your shadow-side into your self, so you can move together as a whole and much more powerful person.

I REALLY liked this tattoo idea.

But finding a tattoo artist turned out to be incredibly difficult. The better tattoo artists, like all artists, prefer to create their own work to tattoo, rather than tattoo artwork created by others – in fact it’s generally an incredible faux pas to ask a tattoo artist to tattoo someone else’s design or to ask them to design for someone else to tattoo. This is exactly as it ought to be, but it does mean that your tattoo artist needs to be able to draw whatever design you’re contemplating.

Also, tattoo artists, like artists generally, usually specialize in a particular visual style – greyscale realism (realistic tattoos made with only black/gray ink, no color), watercolor (bold use of color, more flowing style), blackwork (bold black lines, like my phoenix), fine-line (single needle), among about 40,000 others.

Within a style, most artists also specialize in a particular subject, e.g. detailed botanical studies, owls, legendary animals, Chinese watercolor landscapes, manga and anime characters – the list is pretty much endless.

The challenge with this tattoo is that it crosses several different genres. The incredibly detailed tiger called for grayscale realism combined with color. The mist required skill with flowing color, with a Chinese landscape painting sensibility. The two put together required an artist who could do not just a single subject (such as the tiger) but an entire composition.

On top of that, tigers in action are pretty complicated to draw. Not stationary tigers – the world is paved in tattoos of tiger heads, and there are lots of photos to use as references. But to draw a tiger walking naturally, you have to understand more about feline anatomy and movement, and there are really very few tattoo artists who have enough experience to draw a truly beautiful and realistic walking tiger.

After coming up with the concept sketch, I spent about two months trawling Instagram (where pretty much all tattoo artists put up their portfolios) searching for the right artist. I was delighted when I found an artist who I thought could do the work – and she was in Berkeley! I sent her my design, turned up for a consultation, and scheduled an appointment.

But.

With tattoos, you typically get the design a few days before the session, even if you made the appointment months in advance. Nobody’s explicitly said why, but I suspect it’s to discourage clients from making four thousand revision requests before the day. Which is reasonable but makes for a rather suspenseful time for the client – you don’t know if you’re going to like it until a few days before the appointment.

And, as it turned out, I didn’t. What I got appeared to have been poorly drawn by AI – a tiger with dog-like paws, spots rather than stripes on the back, and a weirdly misshapen spine. I sighed and emailed the artist to cancel the appointment.

At that point I was down to two artists, both based out of Seoul. (A lot of the best tattoo artists, particularly in blackwork – my favorite style – come from South Korea, which is ironic because tattooing is actually illegal there.) Both specialized in tigers, but Forest got the nod because she did more complex compositions – you can see them on her Instagram feed. When I found out she was doing a guest artist residency in Melbourne, Australia right now, my decision was made. I emailed her and bought tickets two days later.

My flight is about to land in Australia. I’m giving myself two days to rest up before the tattoo; I didn’t want to go into it jet-lagged and exhausted. So while I arrive late Friday night (Australia time), tattooing doesn’t start until Monday. I don’t have any particular tourist plans; this trip is a pilgrimage, or perhaps more accurately a capstone to twenty years of my last era, and a bold step into my new phase.

Here’s my final tattoo art, and a mockup of how it’s likely to look on my left arm. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Tattoo art by Forest https://www.instagram.com/forest__tt
mockup of tiger tattoo, by Forest: https://www.instagram.com/forest__tt

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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.