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November 25, 2023 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

Adventures in velvet weaving

I’ve wanted to weave velvet for years. I fell in love with it when I took Barbara Setsu-Pickett’s velvet class at Convergence, back in 2018, where I wove this spiffy sample:

The sample shows a few of the things that can be done with velvet: cut loops, uncut loops, tall pile, short pile, different fibers (orange rayon embroidery thread center, cotton in the purple and green sections), etc. (It was also a ton of fun to weave!)

However, on my return home, I was daunted by the equipment requirements, especially for the number of velvet pile warps needed for weaving on the jacquard loom. I also emphatically did not have space for a velvet cantra (the frame that holds the bobbins for the pile warps) in the garage. Nor did I have the time to study velvet or set up the loom.

But times change. This time the catalyst was selling Maryam. Yep, I’m down to “just” one TC-2. I hadn’t used Maryam pretty much since I got her, and she was taking up a LOT of space in the garage. I had bought her because I thought you could only do one project at a time on the jacquard loom, in which case two looms made sense so I could weave samples on one loom and a personal project on the other.

However, I discovered that you can have multiple projects on one TC-2! You can’t do that on a wooden loom (because the wood will flex, you always want to center your warp), but the TC-2 has steel beams that won’t deflect at all if the warp is beamed to one side. Since my loom is three modules wide, that means I can potentially have three different projects on the same loom, as long as I don’t mind weaving relatively narrow (14.5 inch in the reed) projects (and purchasing some extra warp beams).

That means I can weave velvet, samples, and another personal project and switch between them, quickly and easily, on just one jacquard loom.

So I had been considering selling Maryam for a while, but wasn’t willing to put forth the effort to make it happen. Then I was contacted by a textiles professor at University of Georgia who was seeking a used TC-2 for his lab. We struck a deal, and Maryam left for her new home three days ago. Here’s a pic of her as she was loaded into the truck, headed for her new home:

I’m pretty sure she’ll be well-treated there. The plan is to use her to weave electronic textiles, which sounds much more interesting for her than sitting around in my garage.

Anyway, Maryam’s departure freed up a tremendous amount of space in the garage, including space for that velvet cantra.

So I’m back to working on velvet. The design possibilities are AMAZING. Even with solid velvet in a single color (which can be woven on a 4-shaft loom!), there are so many design choices:

cut vs. uncut loops – the uncut loops are typically much lighter and more lustrous than cut ends, though it depends on the fiber
Pile fiber (silk is shiny where it’s uncut, but is much darker and plush when cut; linen produces a stiff pile; unmercerized cotton produces a matte pile)
height of pile – shorter pile tends to produce a plusher result, while taller pile stands, well, taller; you can outline tall pile with a border of shorter pile, etc.

You can also do velvet where the pile appears in some places but not others, creating figured or voided velvet. You can cover the “blank” (non-pile) areas with brocading weft or another layer of cloth in a different weave structure.

And then if you want to get even fancier, you can do polychrome velvet, and have two or more pile warps going simultaneously. Then you have four options for design: no pile warp up, Color A up, Color B up, and both Colors A and Color B up. This allows you to do designs in Color A, Color B, AND the blends between them. The possibilities are endless.

I was fortunate enough to chat with Wendy Landry yesterday. She wrote the definitive book on velvet, Velvet on My Mind, Velvet on my Loom – and patiently answered all of my zillion questions. I have another friend who’s good at woodworking, and who will help me build the velvet cantra. I am also armed and dangerous with five hundred Style M bobbins (meant for sewing machines, but good for velvet pile, too), an automatic sewing-machine-bobbin winder, and one hundred sixty-two 5500-yard cones of rayon embroidery thread (mostly full) in 97 colors. This is going to be FUN!

The current plan is to weave velvet at a density of 90 ends per inch, using 20/2 mercerized cotton for the foundation warp, and putting on a polychrome (two sets of colors) pile warp. One of the polychrome pile warps will be solid black, 60/2 silk; the other will be a symmetric color gradient in shimmering rayon machine embroidery thread. That should allow me to create a nearly infinite array of designs.

Because I’m weaving only 14.5 inches wide, I’ll have to put on “only” 1,320 warp threads. That’s a lot, but not infeasible. I’m really looking forward to this project, and have already started winding the warp for the foundation cloth.

WHEE!!

Meanwhile, I have been keeping up with the powerlifting. We recently tested my max lifts, and I’m pleased to say that I can now:

squat 305 pounds:

deadlift 315 pounds:

and bench press 155 pounds (sorry – forgot to video that one!)

That totals 775 pounds. I only need 703 pounds to qualify for USPA Nationals next June, so my goal is to do a meet in January to get an “official” number, and register for the national-level competition as soon as possible afterwards. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it doesn’t fill up before I can register.

Because, as you know…

June 24, 2023 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

The joys of summer: weaving and tomatoes!

It’s been a while, but here’s an update!

Two big things have happened recently: I’m back to weaving AND to tomato breeding!

I’ve been weaving on Grace (one of my two TC-2 jacquard looms), on a warp that’s set up for color samples. I spent a long time a few years ago agonizing over exactly what color combinations to put together for which samples – and never actually got around to weaving any of the samples. And I’ve long since forgotten what colors I dyed. (I suppose I could go look it up, but where’s the fun in that? 🙂 ) So now I’ve got probably about 15-17 yards of warp left, with a surprise color change every 1.5-3 yards. It’s a double weave warp – one layer is solid color and the other layer is divided into three sections, each a different color.

I plan to weave color samples with whatever colors happen to be on the loom when I need the sample. That probably sounds weird, but since I can use many different colors to illustrate color mixing principles, I think it will work pretty well.

I chose double weave because it allows me to play with two-color stripe patterns easily (jacquard magic!). But recently I’ve just been weaving with solid warp colors, in two separate layers. Like this:

The top and bottom layers are weaving different patterns, but they’re all illustrating a principle of color blending: the smaller the patches of color in your fabric, the more color blending you get.

In this swatch, the same colors are used, but the size of each color block increases left to right and top to bottom. As the patches of color get bigger, they blend together less and less.

And here is another set of samples, that explore the effects of color choices in the same patterning.

Color mixing samples in different colors

Why am I weaving these on a jacquard loom when all of these samples could be woven on just 8 shafts?

It’s because the jacquard can pivot from one structure to another in the blink of an eye. So I save a LOT of time because I don’t have to put on a new warp, or rethread an existing warp, every time I want to weave a different pattern. That allows me to weave a wide array of samples on just one warp, with no rethreading. Whee!

It is nice to be weaving again; it’s been a really long hiatus.

The other thing I’ve started working on again, after a similarly long hiatus, is tomato breeding. I rescued two nearly-lost varieties bred by Tim Peters: Fruity Fix and Fuzzy Mix. Fruity Mix, which has fabulous flavor, was relatively easy to stabilize and reintroduce, via Wild Boar Farms, where it’s available as Tim’s Taste of Paradise.

But Fuzzy Mix hasn’t been perfected, and it’s a much harder “sell” because it isn’t releasable in its current form. It is fascinatingly furry, compact, heavy-bearing, and pretty drought-resistant – all good. However, the fruit tastes like diluted battery acid!

Here’s a pic of Fuzzy Mix that I took this morning. There’s a “normal” tomato plant in the top right, and two Fuzzy Mix plants, one in the center and one in bottom center.

Fuzzy not only has very woolly leaves, but it has very thick, leathery leaves, making it quite drought-resistant. A few years ago I left the area for ten days and the gardener turned off the water to my tomato pots; I returned to find the regular tomatoes dramatically wilted, and Fuzzy Mix fat, happy, and totally unbothered. This seems like an excellent trait for a tomato (especially these days with drought everywhere), and I’d like to get other people working with its genes.

You’re probably wondering about the red ribbons and the blue tape. These are my tomato crosses. To cross-breed tomatoes, you find a flower that’s about to open, and cut off everything except the stigma (female part of the flower). Then you collect some pollen from the male parent, by putting a piece of plastic or glass under a mature flower and then vibrating the flower stalk with an electric toothbrush (!) to shake out the pollen.

After you have the pollen and the bare stigma, you simply drag the stigma through the pollen to cross-pollinate it. Do this for a few days to make sure the cross “took,” and voila! You are on your way to a new tomato variety.

Of course, you need to document your crosses, so that’s what the ribbon and blue-tape labels are for.

Since Fruity Mix (which is the variety I rescued and arranged to reintroduce) is the best-flavored tomato I know, and since I’m also quite sentimental about its history, I’m breeding it to Fuzzy Mix in an attempt to get a good-tasting AND fuzzy/drought resistant tomato. I’m also trying a cross with The One, which is a variety that William Schlegel is developing out of some varieties in the Open Source Seed Initiative.

My other “project” is getting other breeders interested in Fuzzy Mix. As I mentioned earlier, it has a lot of characteristics that might be useful in a tomato plant, especially as climate change continues. Drought resistance, yes, but furry tomato plants often have better pest resistance too (the fuzz can deter insects). And because Tim Peters bred Fuzzy Mix out of a bunch of wild varieties, there may be genes for disease resistance coming along for the ride. So it has a lot of potential.

I’m currently one of only a handful of people with seeds for Fuzzy, so I really want to interest other people in it so it doesn’t get lost again. (If you – or anyone else you know – want to try breeding with it, email me!)

But in the interim, I’m going to do some breeding work myself. This year I’m just cross-pollinating things, but next year I’ll likely plant one bed entirely to the (probably inedible) Fuzzy Mix crosses. I’ll grow a few tomatoes for eating fresh, but I’ll focus on my tomato breeding work next year, I think.

The fun part is that tomato breeding really doesn’t take that much time (if you’re already planning to grow tomatoes, that is). I spent about an hour this morning cross-pollinating a bunch of flowers, and that’s very likely all the breeding work I’m going to need to do this year. Next year I’ll probably grow out 16-20 plants from the cross-bred fruits, selecting for fuzziness initially, and then flavor.

20 tomato plants sounds like a lot, but it’s really not a ton when you consider all the genetic diversity available! If I had double the gardening space I could do a lot more work with them. (On the other hand, let’s face it – if I had double the gardening space I’d just start working with more breeding projects!)

Oh, and the powerlifting?

Here’s me setting a new one-rep max on bench press: 70 kg! That’s 154 pounds (616 weasels), which is 20 lbs more than I could do last year.

January 27, 2023 by Tien Chiu

Spring is coming

The last few months have felt like the rising sap of spring.

Janet and I launched the Handweaving Academy in December, to great success – over 500 people have signed up already! After an intense year of preparation, that feels just amazing.

Now, of course, we need to deliver on our promises – but fortunately, there are two of us to write all that content. And we are already working on adding other teachers. While we’re working hard, I’m down to working six days a week, and only about 7-8 hours a day. That is way less than I’ve worked any time in the last six years. Having a business partner I trust is fantastic – I know Janet has my back, and I have hers.

Jamie is also (finally!) most of the way through her transition. It’s been a really tough 4-5 years, as the physical and emotional changes associated with hormonal transition, coupled with the need to retool her entire identity, have been really tough on both of us. (It’s called “second puberty” for a reason!) Nonetheless, she’s figured most of it out, and the mood swings have mostly calmed down. Life has a LOT less stress now, for both of us.

Which is why I actually picked up a novel AND read it all the way through! earlier this month. Not only did I read the first book, but I actually devoured the entire rest of the trilogy and am halfway through with another series by the same author. This is the brilliant N.K. Jemisin, and the trilogy is The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. Every book in the trilogy won the Hugo Award, one of science fiction’s greatest accolades. No one else has ever done that, or won the Hugo for three years in a row. (The Stone Sky won the Hugo AND the Nebula award – the other big prize in SF.)

Anyway. More important than the awards (which are just someone else’s opinion, after all) is the fact that Jemisin managed to suck me so deeply into the book that I read practically the entire thing in one sitting. This, from someone who hasn’t read fiction in about twenty years. And then I read the next one. And the last one. And now I’m diving into a new series.

What I love about Jemisin’s work is that the plot is NOT the typical science fiction plot (sometimes it feels like there’s only one of them), nor does she write books that reflect white middle class American values and assumptions. Her books explore a lot of deep themes, like slavery, racism, and hatred – not in a bash-you-over-the-head moralistic way, either, but with questions unfolding along with the plot and characters. Like Octavia Butler, my other favorite science fiction writer, Jemisin is a Black woman and brings those questions and experience to her writing.

I think she is one of the best writers I’ve ever read. (Now binge-reading her work, of course.)

Anyway. There are two great joys here. One is that I’ve discovered an amazing writer and am reading fiction again. The other is that I have time and emotional energy to be reading again. The last five years have been so stressful and hard-working that there was no space for that kind of luxury. Everything was focused either on Jamie’s transition or on building the teaching business. So to have the mental space and time to be reading again feels like a seismic shift.

I’m also weaving again for the first time in a long time. I took a piece off the Workshop Dobby Loom a few weeks ago. It’s simple but also beautiful, and I just love it:

Neither of these photos really captures the beauty of it, though. It’s a continuous gradient that goes from blue-green through blue to purple and back again twice over the course of the shawl. Design-wise, it’s simple but beautiful. I’m really enjoying it.

It has really been hard not having the energy to weave. When I went to start the Handweaving Academy, I chatted briefly with Linda Ligon, the founder of Interweave (and Handwoven magazine). She thought it was a wonderful idea but warned me that when she founded Interweave Press, she rapidly found that she herself had no time to weave. And that if I followed that path, I’d likely have much less energy to create my own work.

And that’s largely been true, not just this past year but the last six years. Do I miss weaving? Yes. I opened the latest Complex Weavers Journal yesterday and found it full of fascinating, in-depth explorations of the many things that are possible with a loom. I used to have the concentration and the leisure to do work like that, and I miss it.

But teaching weaving is incredibly rewarding as well. I LOVE what I do – both the teaching and figuring out the logistics of running a teaching business. I’m not sorry I went in this direction, but I’m grateful to finally have time and space – even if it’s only a tiny bit – to explore my own weaving again.

So like I said: it feels like spring!

And if you’re wondering about the weasels? I’m recovering from a minor injury (strained adductor muscle in my right thigh) so I’m off squats and deadlifts and anything else leg-related for the next few weeks, alas. (First session with the physical therapist on Tuesday.) However, no rest for the wicked – my trainer has me working on upper body stuff for the next few weeks!

Which is good, because I’m rather enjoying the She-Hulk look.

October 28, 2022 by Tien Chiu

Celebrating the power of community

I’ve been thinking lately about the importance of community, and particularly about how you define and choose your personal communities. Because the people you surround yourself with – their values, achievements, and interests – are the people who will define, inspire, and constrain your own expectations and behavior. Choosing the right community will free you to fly. Choosing the wrong community will be stifling at best, and potentially toxic.

For example, by virtually any standard, I’m pretty darn strong right now. (Last week I deadlifted 1,260 weasels (315 pounds). That’s a lot of weight.

However, Boss Barbell, where I lift, isn’t just any gym – it’s a powerlifting gym. In fact, it’s the biggest and best powerlifting gym in the Bay Area, and run by a renowned powerlifter. So if you’re a serious powerlifter, it’s where you go to work out.

As a result, “normal strength” in this gym is….a little skewed, shall we say? My heaviest lifts are more like warmup weights for many of the people in this gym. When I was doing my 315-pound lift, the guy next to me was doing nearly 500!

This creates a context in which 315 pounds looks, well, completely wimpy.

“But,” you say, “This is completely ludicrous! These people are elite powerlifters; they’ve been training much longer than you have; 90% of them are men who are two or three decades younger than you – of COURSE they’re going to be stronger! Don’t compare yourself to them!”

And that’s exactly what I mean by choosing your community wisely. Were I to take these elite, younger male lifters as my community – especially since some of them don’t consider me a good enough lifter to be taken seriously – it would be easy to get neurotic about my comparative lack of achievement. But I’m smart enough not to consider them my community, or to try joining their community. Doing that would park me as a permanent outsider and also at the bottom of the ladder. I made that mistake once, as a young woman in mathematics, and I’m not about to do that again.

This sense of dislocation and inadequacy is exactly what some of my students experience when they come into my classes and see beautiful work being posted by others who have been weaving intensively for a long time or who have art training (etc.). I regularly tell my students two things:

First, everyone is on their own creative journey, with their own creative goals. It really doesn’t matter where someone else is in their creative journey; what matters is your goals and how you are going to achieve them.

“What do you like in your work? What can you make better? How will you make it better? And how can I enjoy it more?” Those are the only questions that should concern you as an artist. “Am I a good artist?” is noticeably absent from the list.

Second, you have your own unique artistic voice, which is born out of your experience, skills, interests, and preferences. Which means that comparing your work to X’s to see whether X is a better artist than you are is just silly. You are different people and you speak with different voices. You can take inspirational elements from X’s work and incorporate them into your artistic vocabulary (though, please don’t imitate or copy!), but fundamentally wondering whether X’s work is better than yours is comparing apples to bicycles. It’s a great way to become neurotic without gaining much.

Having said that, of course it’s difficult to do your work entirely in a vacuum, and if you are the only person in the gym pulling 315 pounds when the ten other people there are pulling 400-500, it’s hard not to feel wimpy and out of place. (And a little frustrated at not being stronger…yet.)

There are two keys to persevering in these circumstances. The first is simply my first piece of advice to students, to remember that you are on your own journey, and that where they are in their journeys is irrelevant to your goals. The guy next to me may be looking to crack an 800-pound deadlift, but that’s his goal. Mine is to break the world record for 50-54 year old women in the 185-pound weight class, and that only requires a 370-pound squat, 415-pound deadlift, and something-or-other in bench press that I probably won’t achieve (bench press is my weakest lift right now).

Staying focused on your own goals lets you ignore the distracting shadows and focus on the target.

The second key, which I think is just as important, is to choose the right community, one that shares your values, where people welcome, appreciate, and encourage you, and you don’t feel out of place. It doesn’t have to be the dominant group in the community at large – but having even a few people who share your interests and values can easily make the difference between success and failure.

That’s true in anything – not just weightlifting or weaving – and is why, when attempting something difficult, I always start by reaching out to others for help. It’s not just about getting the help – though that’s important as well – but also about building a small community I can belong to.

As an entrepreneur, I always formed a small “mastermind” of a couple people who would meet regularly to talk about our businesses – a mini community where we could all support each other. As a weaver, I joined mailing lists and guilds and participated actively in both. And as a powerlifter, I’ve found a few people who lift like me and share my values as well. Not many, but enough. My community – at least for the moment – is more serious recreational lifters, women who lift, and elite lifters who encourage rather than exclude recreational lifters.

They say “It takes a village,” and I think that’s very true.

Ending with two videos that celebrate the power of community: my 315-pound deadlift from last week, and another video of me doing “pause deadlifts” – stopping and pausing halfway up. I was doing those with a 200-pound bar, and managed (at the end of the set) to pause for 10 seconds and still get it the rest of the way up!

(And not to worry – I’m careful about my form, and I have a top-notch coach who knows when to push me and when not to. I also wear a weightlifting belt, which helps protect my back.)

Happy lifting – in whatever you do! May you find happiness in a community of your own.

September 16, 2022 by Tien Chiu

Playing in the dye pots

Yeah, I know. I start by saying “Less fiber content” and next thing you know, I’m posting about dyeing? But hey – that’s what I was up to last weekend. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

My wardrobe, as you may or may not know, consists almost exclusively of tie-dyed clothing. This isn’t because I’m a ‘60s child (I wasn’t born in the ‘60s), nor because I’m a Grateful Dead fan. It’s mostly a practical choice: when you are a five-foot-tall woman with exceptionally wide shoulders, you can pretty much guarantee that nothing off the rack is going to fit.

(How exceptionally wide? The average shoulder width for an American woman is 14.4 inches, and for a man it’s 16.1 inches. Mine are 17.5 inches shoulderbone to shoulderbone – plus all that muscle from powerlifting. I’m basically a freakishly short female linebacker.)

To accommodate my odd dimensions, I buy white T-shirts and white men’s shirts from Dharma Trading Company and dye them so they don’t all look identical. This strategy has worked beautifully for me for many years. 🙂

But then I got a fabulous tattoo covering most of my right arm.

My original theory was that I’d get the tattoo and then wear T-shirts when I wanted to cover it up, and tank tops when I wanted to show it off. As soon as I got the tattoo, though, I realized, “Why the *#& would I ever want to hide this??? I’m going to wear tank tops all year round!!”

Of course the only problem with this theory was that I didn’t actually have any tank tops. Dharma Trading to the rescue! I dyed eight tank tops the weekend after I got the tattoo. Whew! Disaster averted.

But a girl likes to have some variety. So last weekend I dyed eight more, plus a T-shirt for Jamie, who (much to my relief) has FINALLY relented and allowed me to dye something for her.

Here’s what came out of the dyepots (pardon the less-than-perfect photos; I was in a rush):

Blue and rusty orange scrunch pattern tank top

Magenta-purple and green scrunch pattern tank top

Square pattern, yellow-red-orange turquoise and purple tie dye tank top

The last tank top is actually double dyed. That is to say, it’s actually been dyed twice. The first time it was dyed like the second to last one (the orange and yellow flame pattern). Unfortunately, it got a stain on it, so of course the only thing to do was overdye the stain. So I tied it up in a circle pattern, put red around the edges, and dyed the outside black.

Preventing the dye from getting where you don’t want it is a bit of a tricky process – dye has a way of splashing and seeping in very inconvenient ways, especially when it’s something like black on yellow where mistakes would be VERY obvious. (The dye gods are capricious!)

To protect against this, I used a method called “capping” which is just a fancy way of saying “stick the part you don’t want contaminated into a plastic bag and then tie the bag on tightly before applying more dye. I actually capped it twice, once to keep the flame-patterned dye from getting contaminated with red and once to keep the red area from getting contaminated with black.

Here’s what it looked like when fully capped and dyed:

Red starburst tie dye in progress photo, with the red and yellow areas capped off in a plastic bag

And here’s what it looked like when it was partially uncapped:

Red starburst tie dye, partially uncapped, with the red portion showing

Here the first plastic bag has been removed to reveal the red portions but the orange-and-yellow is still protected.

You might be wondering about the sink full of water with ICE floating in it that appears in the background of the photo. The ice is the secret to keeping your tie-dyes bright when you’re rinsing out the dye.

There’s a potentially dangerous moment when you dunk your beautiful multicolor tie-dye into the water. With fiber-reactive dyes, there’s always a lot more dye than the fabric can actually react with, and the moment you plunge the fabric into the water, a ton of loose dye comes off into the water…and can potentially stain your beautiful shirt.

However, if the water is freezing cold, the dye can’t react. That’s because the dye reaction requires alkalinity, moisture, dye, and some heat to take place. The fabric has soda ash (alkalinity) and dye in it, so if you put it in warm water, all four dye reaction components are present. If you put it in ice water, though, there’s not enough heat for the dye to react, and the loose dye can’t stain the fabric.

At the same time, the first rinse bath rinses out the soda ash that gives the dye the alkalinity it needs to react. So after the ice water rinse, all the other rinses are safe to do in room temperature or warm water for as long as you like. In fact, it’s recommended to soak overnight in cold water to make the rinse-out process as easy as possible. The rinse water will turn super-dark with loose dye – but it all comes out. No dye reacts with the fabric. All because of that first ice-water rinse!

Better living through chemistry!

I have another dye day scheduled next weekend – some friends from waaaaaay back in high school are coming over and we’re going to do more tie-dyes together. Since it’s starting to get cooler, I may do some sweatshirts, and maybe some T-shirts and tank tops for Jamie.