garden | Tien Chiu's Blog

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.

June 20, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Whew! What a month!!

I know I’ve been delinquent with the blog updates. I’ll plead that it’s been quite the month! Fortunately, in a very good way.

Janet Dawson and I decided to team up and teach a weave-along about weaving from your stash. We thought we’d get five hundred, maybe a thousand students, tops. Instead, we had over THREE THOUSAND WEAVERS sign up!! We were delighted, but also a wee bit overwhelmed. As a result, we both more or less dropped off the map for about a month.

I did get the sample warp onto the loom and weave the first set of samples for Tourmaline Butterfly. I was doing a rendition of this image:

image of butterfly wing — butterfly wing

The concept is that the cape, when the arms are spread, looks like butterfly wings, with dark green veins coming out from the body of the wearer and ending in the border of dots. The interior of the “wings” portion is intensely colored and shaded out towards the veins to give a dimensional effect.

For the folks who like technical details (if you don’t, just skip to the next paragraph): in all the samples, I used a point threading and a networked rosepath treadling in the pink areas (the tie-up is twill), and a brick-like fancy twill pattern in the green areas. It’s double weave, so the pink is one layer and the green is another layer, stitched together periodically so the fabric comes out as a single layer.

As you can see, the colors are pretty disappointing. I was hoping for some nice hue contrast and a clear, distinct pattern, but there simply wasn’t enough value (light/dark) contrast, and the chunks of color blended into each other even from a relatively short distance, muddying the bright pink into a dull brown.

I sat down and thought about it. I was facing a difficult color dilemma. Green and magenta, the two colors in the bright part of my painted warp, sit opposite each other on the color wheel. That meant that practically any color I chose as weft would blend into a dull color with one or the other of them. The only two exceptions were yellow and turquoise, both of which were strong-minded colors that would shift the colors away from the magenta and green I wanted. And yellow in particular is a super-assertive color that would probably drag attention from the painted warp (yellow is such a diva!).

Nonetheless, I thought I’d give them a shot.

Sample #2 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with yellow, turquoise/blue, and olive green wefts.

None of these were what I wanted – the blue was about the same darkness as the magenta, producing a nearly invisible pattern. The yellow produced a bright result and a clear pattern, but HOO BOY!! took over the entire piece – entirely predictably, and not at all what I wanted.

I thought about it some more and eventually decided that this section was all about magenta, and it would be okay to lose some of the oomph of the green. So I decided to try a dark, dull magenta weft. Using a darker, duller weft is a great way to bring forward the colors in a painted warp (because the eye is more attracted to light, saturated colors), and using a similar color would reinforce the magenta.

This led me to Sample #3:

In the previous samples, I had felt that there wasn’t enough of the painted warp showing due to the shading from the center to the outside of each section (it goes from showing more weft near the outside of each pink section to showing more warp on the inside). So I switched it to showing mostly warp throughout the entire section.

But on seeing it, I decided the sample looked too “flat”. So I wove sample #4, which was Just Right:

Sample #4 for Tourmaline Butterfly, with dark magenta weft and shading towards the edges of each pink section

I like this sample a lot. The darker magenta weft gives it subtle motion without significantly diluting the intensity of the pink areas, and the very subtle shading from dark outside towards lighter inside of each pink area gives it a subtle sense of three-dimensionality. I think for the final piece I will want to make the weft a bit darker, but I will have to weave more samples to be sure.

At the top of the fourth sample is another experiment with a slightly more saturated pink weft. I don’t like that one as much; it looks brighter but not as rich as the one below it. That’s interesting, considering that normally I am a bright-color magpie!

So that’s the Tourmaline Butterfly update.

Meanwhile, other things have been happening!

Jamie and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary! Here we are together, after a wonderful take-out meal from Manresa (three-star Michelin take-out – only in the Bay Area!). Hard to believe we’ve been married for an entire decade, but it’s true.

And yes, 10 years since my handwoven wedding dress really kicked off my weaving career. Hard to believe I had only been weaving 2.5 years when I started it!

And here it is in its home at The Henry Ford museum, being shown to some visitors.

A volunteer there told me that most garments are stored hung for space reasons, but my dress is stored flat in a special, custom-built archival box. I’m glad to hear that they are treating it as precious; I’d like to think it will be preserved for many generations to come.

Finally, the fruit trees Jamie planted seven years ago when we moved in are starting to bear fruit. Lots and lots of fruit. I have been making pie:

Aprium (apricot-plum cross) pie with chocolate ice cream

And, of course, the first tomatoes are ripening. An eager-beaver Sungold.

Sungold tomato - first of the season! — First tomato of the season!

Finally, since no blog post would be complete without a cat, here is Tigress, Queen of the Laundry Pile. Because laundry is not truly clean until it has been liberally bestowed with cat hair.

Whew! What a post. But there was SO much to catch you up on!

May 10, 2020 by Tien Chiu

Tourmaline Butterfly (?)

After taking in quite a few suggestions, both here and in the Color in Weaving Facebook group, I’ve settled on a possible working title: Tourmaline Butterfly. The colors in the warp remind me of one of my favorite stones, watermelon tourmaline:

watermelon tourmaline crystal — Watermelon tourmaline. Photo by Rob Lavinsky.

I was thinking about how best to use the colors. Depictions of flowers seemed too literal and too specific for the way the colors flowed. I thought about doing a waterfall theme, but wasn’t happy with the feel, especially after looking at waterfalls.

Then I was looking at drafts on Handweaving.net, and stumbled on this gorgeous draft by Bonnie Inouye:

draft by Bonnie Inouye, looks like a stained glass window — Draft from Bonnie Inouye, Handweaving.net draft #60970

I love this draft. In particular, I love the blurry lines from the advancing twill design, which suggest a design in the distance, set against the sharp bars in the center. It looks like a stained-glass window. Or like a butterfly’s wings, with the soft colors against the sharp veining that holds the wings together:

monarch butterfly — Monarch butterfly. Photo by Erin Wilson.

blue morpho butterfly — Morpho butterfly (I think). Photo by Anne Lambeck.

I’m envisioning a three-quarter or full circle cape with the body of the garment in those lovely pink-and-green tourmaline jewel colors, and with dark green “veins” branching through the garment like the veins on butterfly wings.

As the wearer opened her arms, the “wings” of the butterfly would open, revealing the pink and green.

I’m also considering making the cape so that, when the cape is draped normally, most of what you see is dark green, and you only see the pink and green portions when the arms are spread. In that case I’d be tempted to name the piece Coronavirus Chrysalis. Or maybe just the far more timeless Chrysalis.

The downside to designing the cape like that, of course, is that nobody would see the beautiful pink and green most of the time. It would make a dramatic fashion show garment, but not a very interesting one otherwise….unless, of course, I put a design on the back, where the cape would lie flat, and put the dark green covering the “wings” of the cape.

So many possibilities!

I’m now about 2/3 of the way through tying on the sample warp. The pink and green areas are tied on, now I’m working on the green warp:

This warp is going onto Maryam, and is designed to test whether the pink and green painted warp areas will stay cohesive enough to look good when woven. Also to test the concept for the overall patterning. The warp is 3.5 yards long, and 14.5 inches wide.

Because Maryam is threaded up at 60 ends per inch rather than Grace’s 90 ends per inch, I’ve doubled up the threads to get a good solid cloth. So the resulting sample will be heavier and coarser than the final cloth, but it should still tell me everything I need to know.

Next step is designing the first sample. Bonnie’s draft won’t work for my purposes, so I’ll have to create my own.

Finally, outside, things are happening.

The tomatoes are shooting upwards. I’ll have to hang the trellises this weekend:

The mulberries are ripening. I shook the tree this morning, with very tasty results:

My ginger is sending up shoots. (This is culinary ginger – the stuff you eat. I mostly grow it because the leaves smell so wonderful when you brush against them. But it’s nice having ginger on the back stoop, too! At least I’ll never absentmindedly run out. I love Chinese cooking, so that would be utter disaster.)

And, finally, the yellow irises are flowering. I wasn’t expecting them to bloom this year – I only planted them last year, and the purple irises are already done – but they appear to be, ahem, late bloomers.

(And yes, orange California poppies and roses in the background. The roses actually bloom all year round, even in December. There’s just no stopping them!)

That’s it for now!

August 24, 2019 by Tien Chiu

One launch down, and lookee what I found!!

I launched my free mini-course on color in weaving yesterday! It’s about designing handwoven cloth with bold or subtle patterns, and is designed to solve the age-old problem of your beautiful, bright colors weaving into dull, boring mud. If you’re interested in it, go check it out! It’s free, so you’ve got nothing to lose except your fear of another color disaster.

This free mini-course, and the bigger paid course launch that’s coming up right behind it, are the reason you haven’t heard much from me recently. Getting the courses and the marketing campaign behind the launch ready to go has been an insane amount of work – the last three weeks I’ve been working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, getting everything ready and putting on the final coat of polish. Yesterday I announced the course to my mailing list, and promptly fell over exhausted. I am taking today OFF.

And what am I doing with my day off? Why, preparing for the arrival of the lovely Maryam! The garage is PACKED with stuff, and since she arrives in 3.5 weeks, I’ll need to do some decluttering to make space.

Um, just a little bit of decluttering. Here’s where she’s going to live:

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me.

Fortunately, a lot of the work isn’t too hard. Much of the stuff I’ve accumulated is craft stuff where I’ve clearly headed in other directions, so selling or donating it to others who will make better use of it is a fine idea. The table will replace the rickety table in the back yard. The chairs? Haven’t figured that out yet, but I think they can fit next to Maryam on the sides. The elliptical trainer will be replaced by a rowing machine that can be moved around when I need to warp Maryam. So life moves on, and it’s all a matter of logistics and cleaning things up.

Of course, when you clear out the old to make room for the new, interesting finds crop up. I was sorting through a box of ancient memorabilia yesterday and found this!

That’s me on the cover of Farang Magazine, back in 2003 when I was backpacking through Southeast Asia. Yep, wearing only body paint. 🙂 Through a series of fabulous adventures, I had convinced the best body painter in Bangkok to paint me – just for the fun of it (and he normally charges $5,000/day!) – and he had arranged a photo shoot with a photographer friend. Then his buddy at Farang Magazine called him up, he was stumped for a cover for the latest issue, did Richard have any suggestions? And next thing I knew, I was gracing the cover of a Thai travel magazine, clad only in body paint. (Well, and a shell necklace, if you want to be technical.)

Ah, those were the days.

But those carefree days of lost youth are behind me now. I’m now beyond such frivolity, bent on more serious things. Like total world domination. It’s seed-saving time!

Here are a few of the steps in my seed-saving process.

First, I gather tomatoes from my adorable killer mutant ninja tomatoes. I taste-test them, write my (terse) notes on a slip of paper, and photograph the fruits next to a quarter (for scale) along with the plant number. That will all go into my tomato database.

As you can see, I’m getting yellow Fruity Mix tomatoes this year. This is an excellent thing – last year’s were all red, and I was worried that the yellow genes had all gotten lost. But this year I got orange and yellow as well as red – so am selecting all of the above!

Next step is to squeeze out the fruit gel into labeled cups, and let the gel ferment for a couple days so the gel around the seeds rots away. (The gel contains a germination inhibitor, and also can carry diseases.) After a few days, this cup looks delightfully ripe and rotted:

Next you rinse out the seeds (they sink to the bottom, the gunky stuff pours off the top), dry them on an uncoated paper plate, and put them in a neatly labeled paper envelope. Voila! Freshly saved killer mutant ninja tomato seeds, ready to wreak havoc on another unsuspecting generation.

Of course, the next task is to enter all the information into the database. That’s what I’m not looking forward to. Perhaps later today….

Anyway, I have not been silent because life has been slow. Quite the reverse: it has been PACKED!! Hopefully things should slow down a bit soon, so I won’t be quite so exhausted all the time, and will have other things to show you.

July 26, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Only two things that money can’t buy…

…and let’s face it, true love is overrated. (Sorry, sweetie!)

These are coming out of the garden right now:

plate full of ten or fifteen varieties of tomatoes — bountiful tomatoes!

These are the eating tomatoes, the ones I’m not trying to breed. They’re mostly newer varieties, mostly from Wild Boar Farms. I’m very fond of Brad Gates’ work. In addition to breeding beautiful tomatoes, and tasty tomatoes, he’s also breeding tomatoes for extreme conditions – hot, cold, drought, etc. – in anticipation of climate change. I’m all for anything that will result in continued tomato production in a time of turmoil. Particularly such delicious tomatoes!

Varieties include Sweet Cream, Berkeley Tie-Dye, Sungold, Kaleidescope Jewel, Sunrise Bumblebee, Pink Bumblebee, the tried-and-true Brandywine, Purple Calabash, Cascade Lava, and Brad’s Atomic Grape. Those are just the ones I recognize off the top of my head – there are undoubtedly others. A woman with forty or fifty kids can’t be expected to recognize all of them at first blush! At least, not if you’re me. I’ve never been great with names.

But of course these aren’t the real prizes. The real prizes (sorry, kids!) are the ones that don’t have names, only numbers – the ones that are part of my Fruity Mix breeding project. I grew out thirty-two plants from the three plants that bred true from the last year. Only five of the thirty-two produced tomatoes with the intense, wonderful flavor I was after, and here are an assortment of fruits from those:

I forgot to put in a dime for scale, but the image on my monitor as I type this is about real life scale. The smallest one is just under the size of a dime, and the biggest one is bigger than a nickel but well under the size of a quarter. They are (as originally described) a small cherry tomato, so this is getting back to the original variety. I’m not overly concerned about conservation (it’s flavor I’m after, not returning the variety to its roots), but it’s a sign that I’m on the right track.

I’m delighted to see that the yellow and orange colors have surfaced in this generation. Last generation all the tomatoes were red, and I was worried that the other colors were lost to posterity. However, pink flesh and yellow skin (which produces a red tomato) are both dominant genes, so if the Fruity Mix had gotten crossed to a homozygous-for-red tomato, all the offspring would necessarily have been red in the first generation. In the second generation, the other colors would start coming out as the recessive genes paired up, and I’m pleased to see that there were other colors lurking under the red. I got plenty of red tomatoes, but quite a few yellow and orange and even a red-and-yellow striped tomato! I have no idea where that one came from, but unfortunately the flavor wasn’t great, so I’m not going to grow out its offspring.

There are lots of tasty tomatoes among the 32 plants I grew, but only 5 or 6 have the intensely fruity flavor I’m breeding for. So I am saving seed from the tasty-but-not-Fruity ones (not sure why, maybe just because I’m a pack rat?), but next year I will only grow out seeds from the best Fruity lines. I don’t have time to pursue more than that.

The good news is that only a few fruits are enough to carry on the next generation of breeding, which means lots of tasty tomatoes to eat this year! I’m carrying a small container of them with me to Maryland – I’m flying out there today for a short visit (my esteemed spouse is holding down the fort at home), tomatoes and garlic in hand.