musings

May 31, 2025 by Tien Chiu 7 Comments

Try to love the questions themselves

I’ve run into a snag on the phoenix project. I started predrafting my fiber to loosen it up and also to allow me to spin directly from the end of the roving. However, the change in fiber prep method has also changed the diameter of my “default” yarn. Instead of 7,000 yards per pound as it was before, it’s now averaging almost 10,000 yards per pound. That’s about 30% thinner than it was! That will definitely be a problem for my scarf design.

Here’s a picture of my three skeins so far:

Skein 1 (the dark brown one) was spun using my earlier method (spinning off the fold), and is 7100 yards per pound.

Skeins 2 and 3 (top two) were spun using the second approach (predrafting fiber and then spinning off the end), and average about 10,000 yards per pound.

This makes nice hash out of all my calculations. At this point there are two things I could do:

(1) spend some time figuring out how to spin a consistent 7,000 ypp yarn, then start over

(2) keep going, and accept that the yarn is going to be much finer than anticipated (and possibly different diameter from skein to skein).

I’m thinking that I will just keep going.

This is a bit of a departure for me. Usually I start with a vision, then plan and execute a project around the vision. Lots of side trips and changes along the way, but I always keep the vision in mind. I also like to keep tight technical control over my work.

But this project is a phoenix project, meaning it isn’t about achieving a goal. In fact, it is very specifically NOT about achieving a goal. It’s about letting go of all the old goals, ideas, and relationships, opening up to possibility, and eventually discovering new things (and a new life!) to replace what went before.

So I think I’m going to do something very out of character: embrace process over product, and simply spin up the rest of the yarn without worrying about what it will become. I’ll play with some ideas, sure, but until I have a better idea of what is coming down the pike, there’s no point in planning too far ahead. So I’m just going to enjoy spinning for however long it takes to spin all four ounces. At that point the future will be less murky and I can decide what comes next.

This meandering matches my plans for my future. I have no idea where I’m going to live six months from now. In fact, I am working very hard at NOT figuring out where I’m going to live six months from now. This is extremely uncomfortable for me, because I am the sort of person who likes to have everything decided. I was a professional project manager – being decisive was my job for twenty years.

But I want to hold open space to rediscover things, to allow Future Me to have possibilities and choices that are different from what Past and Present Me would choose. So I am going to shake things up by resolutely refusing to commit Future Me to anything right now. It is rare that life gives us a chance to do a complete reset. I have had that privilege a few times, and I don’t want to waste that opportunity now.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotations:

“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

– Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Stephen Mitchell translation

So with the phoenix, I am planning to sit with the project now. Walk and spin for forty days, or however long it takes. See what it wants to become.

I think there will be lots of potential, though. Here are the color gradients in the most recent two skeins. Beautiful, and full of becoming.

May 26, 2025 by Tien Chiu 15 Comments

Rebooting

It’s been a long time since I posted much, but I’ve decided to restart my blog. It’s been my creative journal over the years, and I only stopped because for a long time, my creative energies were sucked completely into other things.

However, as the Handweaving Academy’s matured, I’m finding that I now have a bit more creative energy for my own projects. So I’m rebooting my blog.

The blog isn’t the only thing that’s rebooting, however. My life goes through periodic Phoenix cycles, where the old life burns away and a new one begins. The last one started when I pivoted away from high-tech to start my own business teaching weaving. I had to change a lot of things about my identity, and rethink what was important to me.

This last month has started another phoenix cycle. This time, it’s because my wife and I are separating. This isn’t a bad thing. We still love each other, but we’ve reached the point where we need to grow in different directions. Sometimes love means knowing when to let go, and this is one of those times. Neither of us is sure where we’re going to move yet. She is thinking Seattle. I have no idea where I’m going to settle yet. My current plan is to move to Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, for three to six months and then decide whether I want to settle in Mexico, or go back to the U.S.

Both of us are looking eagerly forward to our new lives. We are also committed to supporting each other through the transition and staying good friends afterwards. We don’t see this as an end to the relationship, just a transmutation. I know that sounds odd, considering that most divorces are at least somewhat acrimonious, but we still love each other a great deal. We just feel that this is the right time to stop living together, merging finances, and so forth.

(For the last five years, we’ve asked each other every few months whether we’re still right for each other. I think that’s a good question for all couples to ask – it helps keep the relationship healthy. This time, it became clear that we needed to evolve in different directions, and that we couldn’t do that within the bounds of our current relationship.)

As supportive as we are of each other, though, this is a huge change. We have been together for nearly 20 years, and will celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary together on June 12 before we go our separate ways. So I need to reinvent myself as a single person.

When this kind of big change happens, I like to go somewhere else for a while – someplace unfamiliar, that shakes me loose from my old moorings and assumptions. In this case, it’s Mexico. I visited Mexico City recently, and loved it, but decided not to move there because (don’t laugh) there are only two powerlifting gyms in the city and both are prohibitively far away from the places I’d prefer to live. San Miguel de Allende is less expensive and has a large English-speaking population (which will make the transition easier). It may have a powerlifting-appropriate gym, but if it doesn’t, it’s inexpensive enough that I can rent a house and set up a home gym in the back yard.

During the bottom of a phoenix cycle, I also like to do a contemplative, slow project. The last two times, I spun and knit a “ring shawl” – one fine enough to be drawn through a wedding ring – using a drop spindle and spinning while walking, waiting in train stations, and in all the other “in between” times.

Here’s the “Spiral of Life” shawl that came out of my last metamorphosis:

It has eight arms, and eight motifs in each arm, reflecting the themes of earth, air, fire, water, light, darkness, right action, and love. These reflect the important things in life: balance between the Four Elements, between joy and sorrow, taking action/doing the right thing, and love of life/compassion for all things.

This time round, I’m a weaver, not a knitter. So I’m working on a handspun, jacquard-woven scarf, instead.

Here’s the design (so far). This image shows the scarf as it will be woven:

And this image shows the scarf as it will be worn (draped around the neck):

I’m handspinning the yarn for it on a top-whorl spindle, on my morning walks and anywhere else I have time. I’ve even been doing some spinning in the gym between powerlifting sets!

Here are pictures of the silk fiber that I’ll be spinning. The first one shows the phoenix yarn, which I hand-dyed myself from silk brick. Each little braid is about one ounce of fiber, and I’ll need two of them to weave the scarf. (The other two are backup. I’m a belt-and-suspenders kinda gal.)

And here is the blue silk I’ll be spinning. I did not dye this myself; it’s from Fiberartemis on Etsy. I have been admiring her wonderful dye work for ages, and now I get to spin some of it myself!

So far the yarn is coming out at 7600 yards per pound (it might be a little less considering shrinkage after washing). That’s a bit under half the size of a fine laceweight knitting yarn, or about 1.5x the weight of sewing thread. So it is quite fine, especially for yarn spun on a drop spindle.

Here are pictures of some skeins I spun earlier, about 450 yards. They’re from a different color gradient, but the yarn size should be good for sampling.

I’m pleased with it – it is pretty darn consistent, especially considering that I haven’t spun anything at all for over 20 years.

I’ll be weaving it as singles using a double twill structure – the blue and gold sample at the top of this photo. (The bottom sample, in purple and yellow, is taquete – I really didn’t like that much.)

So far the plan is to weave it on a dark blue warp in 10/2 cotton, sett at 24 ends per inch. 10/2 cotton is on the larger side for that weft – normally you would choose a warp about half the weight – but it’s what I have on the loom, and as you can see, it works. There is a small chance I’ll put a finer warp on instead, but given that I’m moving in a few months and the project HAS to be done by then, I think it’s probably better to go with what I have.

I’ll need to spin about 1800 yards of yarn for the scarf, and I spin about 50 yards a day on my morning walks, so this will take at least a month to spin. Spindle spinning is not nearly as fast as spinning on a wheel, but since part of the point is to be meditative and slow, with plenty of time for reflection, that’s perfectly fine with me.

That’s it for today! Look for more posts as the project – and the move – progress.

February 5, 2024 by Tien Chiu 8 Comments

An afternoon playing with AI

The last week or so I’ve been playing “Squirrel!!!” as I chase from one project possibility to another. The warp currently on Grace is about to come off, giving me space for one 29″ wide project or two 14.5″ projects. What luxury! So I have been chasing squirrel after squirrel as I attempt to choose between a dizzying array of options.

I have also been experimenting with AI prompts. I know people have lots of reservations about AI (I do too), but it’s very clear to me that AI is here to stay. So either I sit down now and learn how to use it, or I’ll be forced to later, after it transforms the way we work, find information, and make new things. Given that, I’d prefer to be ahead of the curve.

Above and beyond that, I think ChatGPT and DALL-E are fascinating tools and I’m intrigued by the possibilities they create.

So here is the tale of my afternoon with AI.

I was thinking of putting on another “fire” warp. For those who missed the first one, here’s what it looked like:

This one was composed of four different yarns wound together: silk, unmercerized cotton, and one fine/one thicker mercerized cotton. When I dyed it, they took up dye at different rates, producing the lovely variegated effect you see.

That warp never did get woven, for a variety of reasons, and I finally cut it off Maryam when I sold her. But I was thinking it might be time to revisit it, because it was So. Bloody. Pretty.

However, I felt really stuck for what to weave with it.

Oh, there were the obvious things – California poppies, tigers, phoenixes – all things that would be fun and easy to weave. But I was looking for something with more complexity, meaning, and technical challenge than those.

And since I wanted to play around with AI anyway, I thought I’d take the question to ChatGPT and DALL-E.

I started by asking DALL-E to brainstorm five ideas for imagery I could create with red, orange, yellow, and black. It promptly spat back these ideas:

Prompt asking DALL-E to brainstorm ideas

The mandala sounded fun, but I thought it might be hard to make something that I’d consider meaningful or interesting. However, the geometric animal art sounded intriguing.

I thought of M.C. Escher’s famous tessellation of fish transforming into geese, and wondered if DALL-E could make something similar.

Nope.

DALL-E's attempt at a tessellation transforming tigers into birds

It wasn’t really a great prompt, but I’m not sure it would have done much better with a more detailed one.

I wasn’t terribly enchanted with the idea anyway – it struck me as an interesting but already-done gimmick – but the idea of tesselations and tigers fascinated me for some reason, so I tried again:

DALL-E generated images involving tessellations and tigers

This was not at all what I’d been expecting; I wanted a tiger made out of geometric shapes.

Back to DALL-E:

DALL-E generating a tiger made up of geometric tiger-stripe-like shapes

The first image intrigued me, particularly the way the tiger in the center “hid” in the background.

Still thinking about the tessellations and the transforming tigers, I sent this prompt to DALL-E:

DALL-E showing a tiger dissolving into geometric shapes

Now I was getting to something that might be interesting.

But I thought the geometric patterns had outlived their design usefulness as I continued to explore; they clashed with the smooth curves of the tiger.

So I told DALL-E to ditch the geometric stuff and just do a dissolving tiger.

DALL-E images without the geometric theme

These decidedly did not inspire me; the idea of a tiger disappearing into a burning forest is hardly new.

I poked around the dissolving tiger theme a bit more, with the idea of tigers fading into a city rather than a forest. This was hardly any more original, but I was enjoying playing around.

DALL-E images of a tiger fading into a cityscape

That last photo had me wondering if DALL-E was drunk and should go home for the night!

I decided that the cityscape wasn’t the solution. What about other things that symbolized modern technology?

Back to DALL-E with another request!

First set of images of tigers dissolving into circuit boards, with a cityscape.

Holy wow! I LOVED the image on the left. Especially the fiery glow of the eyes and the circuitry on the “cyborg” half of the tiger.

I wasn’t wild about the cityscape, though, so I asked DALL-E to eliminate it, and just do the circuitry:

Another version of the tiger dissolving into circuitry, with literal circuit board imagery

Uh….nice try, DALL-E…but I didn’t mean literal circuit boards.

Back for another try:

More images of tigers turning into circuitry

Closer. I did a few more iterations, and arrived at this:

Images refining the tiger-circuitry theme

Even closer…but still not quite.

A few more iterations, and I got this:

Final set of DALL-E images showing a tiger in one half and a circuitry tiger in the other half.

The right-hand photo was just about ideal, but DALL-E clearly hadn’t gotten the memo about making the tiger orange.

By this point I’d realized that DALL-E was pretty good at brainstorming ideas but not much good at editing to command. So I went to Photoshop, and fiddled with the tiger to add some color. (I’m pretty sure that color-fiddling was “enhanced” by AI as well, behind the scenes.)

I now had this:

final DALL-E + Photoshop image of a tiger on the left side, dissolving into circuitry on the right side.

A title popped to mind: AI: The Nature of the Beast. I was thinking vaguely of how the living tiger was converted to binary bits as AI gradually took over the world – or something like that.

I showed it to some friends, and one of them said, “What would happen if you flipped the design horizontally?”

Flipping it around, of course, made the starting-point the cyborg, rather than the tiger, since we (or at least I) read left to right. This seemed even more thematically interesting, although the reverse of what I had been thinking: now the AI was coming to life and becoming the “real” tiger.

The design also posed some interesting technical opportunities and challenges. I could use brushed mohair to create the appearance of tiger fur. I could use metallic yarns, or LEDs, or silkscreened circuitry, to enhance the cyborged half. I could do ALL THE THINGS!!!

So that was my afternoon with AI. It only took me about 40 minutes to go from start to finish with all this. The design isn’t done by any means; it’s way too complex and detailed to weave as it stands, and converting it to jacquard and adding metallics, screen printing, etc. would all take a ton of work.

That’s fine – I’m not really interested in going straight from AI-generated image to the loom. I feel there should be “hand of the maker” involved, and I also don’t like using the jacquard as a low-resolution printer. It’s a very common way that people weave on jacquard looms, but I also think it’s one of the least interesting. So I will likely do considerable modifications if I weave this design.

DALL-E served as an amazing way to generate and develop ideas. While it doesn’t produce anything on its own, and its original images weren’t thrilling, I managed to explore ten or twenty evolving ideas very rapidly, and wound up with something I found both interesting and worth exploring/working with further. It’s now in my “ideas” folder and I may very well weave it.

I don’t think that AI is going to replace artists. What it is going to do is reduce the skill required to make art. Instead of having to be an expert with a paint brush or with Photoshop/Illustrator, you can simply give it your idea and get one – or five, or fifty – possible directions you could go with it. You can then work with it to refine your idea further.

This version of DALL-E isn’t very good at modifying existing images, but that is coming. Adobe has already added AI features to Photoshop that allow you to circle an area, type in “Add a blue house with glowing windows,” and it will seamlessly add a blue house with glowing windows. Or replace a stop sign with trees, or whatever else you like.

My view on DALL-E and similar AIs, at least for now, is that they are likely to do for digital art what Photoshop did for traditional photography. Photoshop removed the need to have incredible technical skills at shooting, developing, and printing photos, because if you didn’t like something, you could always “Photoshop it” to fix lighting, add elements, etc. It didn’t remove the urge to create, it made it easier to create and reduced the skills required to create something you liked.

I personally really like DALL-E. That’s because I have a lot of ideas that I can’t give voice to because I don’t have the drawing skills. I mean, I can barely draw stick figures. But an afternoon playing with DALL-E enabled me to explore a lot of ideas, visually, that I could never have explored otherwise, because I simply didn’t have the skills.

Is that “cheating”? I don’t think it is. It’s simply a tool that makes it easier for me to create.

I love it.

P.S. Yes, I know there are a lot of ethical issues around copyrighted images and content being used without permission to train the models. As an artist and a writer, I do get (and share) the concerns. However, I also think those issues will be sorted out in time, and I also think that, either way, AI is here to stay.

October 28, 2022 by Tien Chiu 10 Comments

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 3, 2022 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Time for a blog reboot

It’s been some years since I posted to this blog with any regularity. During most of this time, I’ve been completely consumed with the teaching business. (Making a career change is hard. Starting a business is very hard. Combining the two – all I can say is, it’s been an insane six years and I’m very grateful that I inherited my mother’s inexhaustible energy and iron will. Thanks, Ma!)

But I’ve also been torn about posting to the blog for other reasons.

For one thing, there has been very little fiber stuff going on that hasn’t been directly related to the teaching business. That’s partly because there hasn’t been much going on, period, that hasn’t been directly related to the business (working 60-70 hours/week leaves very little time for anything else). But it’s also because when you’re living, thinking, and breathing weaving for work all your waking hours, the last thing you want to do with the extra hour or so you have left is…more weaving.

So why not write about the business-related fiber stuff? Well, basically because I am fiercely committed to keeping this blog non-commercial. This blog has always been about my personal creative life and thoughts, and I feel strongly that this is incompatible with writing about the business side. It’s too easy to slide into marketing or teaching stuff and I emphatically feel that this blog should be about neither.

Having said that, there are still adventures and interesting thoughts to share, and I plan to start sharing them again, since I have a trifle more free time and mental bandwidth than I have had over the last five years. (I am through the HUGE learning curve on figuring out teaching, marketing, and running a business, and while launching the Handweaving Academy is a huge amount of work, I have a business partner and a small but intrepid team to help, so I don’t have to do everything by myself now. Thank goodness!) But I want to give fair warning: while I hope you’ll find it of interest, there will likely be less weaving content than there historically has been. More about powerlifting (a style of weightlifting, and my new passion), philosophy, good food, and (of course) cats.

Onward!