Tien Chiu

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February 19, 2024 by Tien Chiu

Fire in the rain

Well, the velvet attempt was a bit of a disaster. I’m still determined to weave velvet, but I’ve realized that debugging the process and solving all the problems is likely to take months. More on that in a future blog post. (I haven’t given up, just contemplating my next move.)

Since I would really like to have a finished project – any project! – someday, I’ve decided to warp up the left side of Grace. I was initially thinking about a black and white warp, which is what most people put onto a jacquard loom because of its versatility. However, black and white is booooooring. (I also almost never use white in my designs.) So I decided to create another “fire” warp instead.

Here’s the one I cut off Maryam when I sold her:

warp dyed in many shades of orange, yellow, and red

It’s a mix of different fibers and yarn sizes. Here’s how that warp looked, before dyeing:

warp prior to dyeing, showing the different types of yarn in the warp

I think that warp was a mix of mercerized cotton, silk, and unmercerized cotton. The fibers took the dye differently, producing the gorgeous variegation shown above.

This new warp is a different mix. It’s one strand of 10/2 tencel, one strand of mercerized 10/2 cotton, one strand of a 4/28 nm cabled silk, and one strand of 20/2 silk. They should absorb dyes differently, and also reflect light differently – some are very lustrous, others are not. It should be interesting!

Here’s the warp halfway through winding:

partially wound warp on a large warping mill

I wound the entire 29″ warp in a single bout. I know you’re not supposed to do this, but with painted warps, winding multiple bouts usually results in abrupt color shifts in the middle of the warp. There are ways to make that less noticeable, but for me, it’s easier just to wind a super-wide warp, dye it, and then separate it out into smaller sections when warping.

(I can get away with winding a very wide warp because I’ve got a large warping mill. I think this approach would not work nearly as well on a warping board.)

Now to the rain part. It’s been pouring about half the time, which is fantastic because this is California and we (always) desperately need rain. But my dye studio is on the patio, and, well, it’s raining for the next four days. (Hurray! Boo! Hurray!)

Fortunately, we have a table that sits under an underhang, and stays dry. So I sneaked out during a lull in the rain and did a little dyeing:

warp being dyed in sheet pans

It looks like a solid color in the photo, but once it’s rinsed and dried, it should be all shades of fire. (Crossing fingers that this actually happens – dyeing always entails some randomness.)

I used 1.75 gallons (really!) of golden yellow to start, pouring it over the warp and squishing to soak the entire warp in yellow. (I really didn’t want white spots.) Then I drizzled 2 quarts of orange and red-orange over it, flipped it over, and squirted more orange/red on the yellow spots. My goal was a mostly orange warp with some areas of red-orange and a few areas of gold.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll start rinsing out the warp. I think it will work great for my AI-generated tiger, so I’m going to spend the next week or two working a bit more on the design. In particular, I want to think about how I want to render the circuitry – whether to weave it in metallic yarns, embroider it, couch real circuit boards down, or (this sounds exciting) use the retro-reflective yarns I bought ages ago to create brilliantly reflective areas.

(Retro-reflective yarn, in case you’re wondering, is a plastic yarn that’s been coated with the same glass beads that are used for high-visibility/reflective clothing. It looks flat gray until you shine a light directly at it, at which point it turns brilliantly white with reflected light.)

In case you’d forgotten, here’s the tiger I plan to weave:

cyborg tiger

The left part of the tiger will use the Fire warp, and the right side will use mostly the black warp, I think.

Can’t wait to see how this all turns out!

Filed Under: All blog posts, dyeing, textiles, weaving Tagged With: cyborg tiger, velvet

February 11, 2024 by Tien Chiu

Velvet rabbit

The last few months I’ve felt excruciatingly snail-like in my progress towards weaving velvet. I’m glad to say that I am now rabbiting along!

My friend Chris built my cantra for me in about five hours on Friday. Whoopee!!

Here it is, minus the rods that hold the bobbins:

Velvet cantra

The rods that hold the bobbins aren’t in yet – I forgot to order the rods! – but they will drop into the slots on the sides. I’ll add a brake weight and a counterweight to each bobbin, like this:

velvet bobbins set up on a rod, showing  weight and counterweight

The brake weight’s job is just to put a little friction on the yarn so the bobbin doesn’t spin out of control. The counterweight (right-hand weight) is what tensions the yarn. It’s basically live-weight tension for individual threads.

Now that the cantra is built, I can start winding bobbins and tying on the pile warp. My plan is to do polychrome velvet with two different pile wefts, which (for non-weavers) basically means you get two colors of the fluffy bits, and can choose what color of fuzz you want on top.

Not satisfied with two solid colors (why do anything the easy way when the hard way will do?), I’m doing two color gradients, one in each set of pile warps.

Pile warp one will be a blue to green to blue gradient, like this:

gradient - blue to green to blue

Pile warp two will be a yellow to red gradient, like this:

gradient - yellow to red

I had already experimented with designs a bit, and you can see the results in this blog post.

This time, instead of hunting down royalty-free imagery on the Web, I decided to play with Dall-E again. I spent about twenty minutes playing with different artistic styles. I finally settled on two designs to develop further: a California poppy in a woodcut style, and (in honor of Lunar New Year) a Chinese dragon, paper-cut style.

California poppy generated by Dall-E
Chinese dragon generated by Dall-E

I took them into Photoshop and started modifying the images and simulating the gradients. Here’s the poppy, so far:

Modified California poppy

I’m not super pleased by the green anthers, and may change them to the orange. Or maybe not. It’s not realistic, but it does add nice visual focus to that sea of orange.

I will also probably change the frame to blue/green rather than yellow/red – far less distracting. Or I could just make it plain black, which might work even better.

I’m still working on the dragon, but I’m excited about the possibilities! Here’s the partly-finished drawing:

Yellow/red and green/blue Chinese dragon

I need to add more touches of blue and green and fiddle around a bit, but I think it will look really good when I’m done.

It will still be a while before I’m actually weaving velvet, though. I need more tools, for one thing. For another, I have to wind 440 bobbins and get all those threads loaded onto the loom. So it will likely be another month of prep work before I’m actually weaving anything.

(I know that takes patience…but can’t I be patient faster?!?)

To assuage my impatience, I’ve started picking out yarns for the pile warps. Here is the blue-to-green gradient (pardon the messy table):

blue to green spools arranged in a color gradient

I’m using the ones in the middle row; the other two rows are candidate yarns that I eventually decided not to use.

I spent this afternoon working on bobbin-winding. After nearly four painstaking hours, I had wound….five bobbins.

But what beautiful bobbins!

Five bobbins in a color gradient

I didn’t actually spend four hours winding those five bobbins, of course. Mostly I was figuring out the process of creating bobbins, and how to make sure they all had about the same amount of thread. I still have to make some modifications to my process, but I think I’ve mostly figured it out.

You may have noticed that each of the bobbins has several colors on it. Four colors, in fact. This is because I’ve only got one spool of most of my colors, but I rather like it – it adds subtle color variations, and a little pizzazz.

These are only test bobbins; I’ll actually be winding 220 bobbins in each color gradient. Once I have the process down, it should go a lot faster.

I’m already dreaming of advanced structural games I can play while weaving velvet. The possibilities are AMAZING. But first, I have to get the loom set up and the basics down. Patience, grasshopper!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: velvet

February 5, 2024 by Tien Chiu

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:

orange and yellow-orange painted warp

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?”

Previous photo, flipped

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.

Musings

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.

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings, textiles, weaving Tagged With: AI, jacquard

January 29, 2024 by Tien Chiu

Set a new powerlifting state record!

Saturday was the USPA Central Strength Classic, my second powerlifting meet ever. And it went well!

I was nervous enough beforehand to make a list of 34 items to bring or do the morning of the meet. I figured the less I had to think, the better. And that turned out to be true…

I arrived early, geared up in my (ahem) very subtle colors:

Turned out everyone else was wearing black, though some got “racy” and added a little colored trim. (Why are people so darn afraid of a little color??) It was fine, though – I loved my outfit and didn’t feel particularly self-conscious about it. (I was too busy being nervous about everything else!)

The first half of the meet was terrifying. I was so nervous during the first lift (squat) that I was almost shaking. Unfortunately, it showed – I missed my first two lifts, the first because I didn’t squat low enough, and the second because I got slightly off-balance and “bounced” on the way back up (dipped down and then up, which is not allowed).

That was when it became “do or die”.

In powerlifting, you’re allowed three attempts at each lift. If you don’t succeed in at least one of those three attempts, you’re disqualified from the event entirely.

I had missed my first two attempts, so if I didn’t get the third one, I’d be out. Which also meant I wouldn’t be able to qualify for Nationals (my main goal) with this meet. Which also meant that I might miss Nationals entirely, if registration filled up before I could do another one.

So the only thought going through my head as I went up for the third lift was, “OMG, I HAVE to nail this, or I’m going to bomb out. Please, please don’t let me bomb out!!”

And I didn’t.

In fact, I set the state record for my age/weight class! 133 kg, or 292.6 pounds. Here’s a video of the lift:

That is significantly below my all-time max of 310, but after the first two disastrous lifts, I played it safe for the last one. Thank goodness!

After that disastrous-then-triumphant start, my nerves settled down (thank goodness). I missed my first bench attempt for technical reasons (I forgot to wait for the commands), but got the next two. I finished solid at 143 pounds (65 kg).

And deadlift went smoothly. Here I am, deadlifting 313.5 pounds, just shy of my max. I think I might even have been able to do a little more! Next time.

Adding up the three lifts, I totaled 749.1 pounds (340.5 kg), which is pretty darn good for a 53-year-old!

Special thanks to my friend Emily, who volunteered to be my handler for the event. The handler keeps track of stray objects (“Emily, where did I leave my phone???”), helps with warmups, tells the organizers what weights the lifter will attempt, and generally makes sure the lifter doesn’t have to think about anything but lifting. Not everyone has a handler, but I was SO glad that Emily did it for me! Because I was in absolutely NO shape to think about anything other than lifting.

My total is enough to qualify me for the 2024 USPA Nationals as a Class 1 lifter (they get to register a bit earlier than Class 2 lifters). So guess where I’m headed this June?

I’ll do one or two practice meets between now and then, though, just so I’m less damn nervous when I actually get there. I think it’ll be fun (and hopefully less terrifying!).

Off to register for Nationals!

Filed Under: All blog posts, powerlifting

January 22, 2024 by Tien Chiu

Painted warps and meet prep

My next class at the Handweaving Academy is going to be Designing Painted Warps. So of course I have a painted warp on Grace, and have been weaving samples in lots of structures, stripe patterns, and so forth. The nice thing about a jacquard loom is that you can weave any structure you like in any sett you like (up to the maximum sett for your configuration), without having to rethread or resley.

This vastly speeds up sampling. So far I’ve woven something like 25 samples, all in different structures and/or at different setts. On a shaft loom, that would probably have taken me 1-2 weeks at least. I did it in two days. Go Grace!!

Most of the samples are intended to be instructional rather than pretty, but here’s a quick snapshot of my favorite:

painted warp swatch with rainbow colors

I’ve still got another 7-8 yards of warp left – I may not weave the rest, though, as I may have enough to demonstrate my points already.

I am still replacing pistons on Grace, and have arrived at a dreadful conclusion. I have (surprisingly – what’s this common sense thing??) realized that perching on a stepladder, leaning way over into the loom, and doing fiddly stuff with both hands while trying to stay stable on the stepladder might not be the wisest thing to do. It’s certainly difficult and uncomfortable.

The more ergonomic and safer thing to do would be to remove the heddle kits from the loom, put the heddles on a table, and do all the fiddly piston-replacing stuff at my leisure, while seated in a nice, comfy position.

The only catch is: removing the heddle kits means rethreading. And I loathe rethreading. With the blazing fury of a thousand exploding suns. (Ask me how I really feel….)

On the other hand, not falling off a stepladder, contorting my body into cramped positions, or ruining my wrists does have a certain attractiveness.

So I’ve decided to remove the heddle kits from the loom, change out the pistons, and rethread. It will take time but it will also be (literally!) less painful than trying to change the pistons with everything in place.

For reasons too tedious to mention, that also means redoing the velvet warp from start to finish. I’m not wildly enthused about that but it does give me the opportunity to get the colors right, and maybe change some details of the configuration. C’est la vie.

Sometimes it feels like I’m taking two steps forward and eighteen steps back. But, as I keep telling myself, if you’re on an epic journey into uncharted territory, you have to expect to get lost in a swamp, fight off orcs and goblins, and eat frogs and lizards to survive the rougher bits. So cheer up! At least there are no orcs (yet!), and the food’s good, too. Onward ho!

Powerlifting-wise, I’m in the final stages of prep for my second-ever meet, which is this coming Saturday (January 27th). Last week was my last heavy-lifting week, lifting 290 pounds in squat, 145 in bench press, and 295 pounds in deadlift. Today and tomorrow are some super light weights, just to keep my muscles moving – 185 pounds for squats and 90 pounds for bench press (no deadlift). And then I do absolutely NO lifting for three days. That way I’ll be fully recovered, rested, and at full power going into the meet.

Interestingly, the California state record for women in my age/weight class (50-54, 181-198 pounds) is only 292 pounds for the squat. My personal record is 310 pounds, so breaking that record should be quite feasible as long as I don’t screw up. Fingers crossed!

I am still debating between two T-shirts to wear when not lifting:

orange and yellow tie-dye T-shirt with "I Powerlift Like a Girl" and lots and lots of rhinestones
T-shirt with "OLD LADIES LIFT" and the slogan "Age is inevitable - Weakness is not."

You gotta admit, it’s a tough choice. Which do you like best?

Filed Under: All blog posts, powerlifting, textiles, weaving Tagged With: painted warp

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