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January 15, 2024 by Tien Chiu

Sorting lots and lots of spools (with video!)

The last week has been mostly boring infrastructure upgrades. Grace (my TC-2 jacquard loom) uses plastic pistons to help raise the threads. When it’s damp or hot, the piston expands ever-so-slightly, and threads start raising or lowering incorrectly.

Digital Weaving Norway, which makes the TC-2, recently developed a new type of plastic piston that doesn’t have this problem. I elected to upgrade to the new piston….which means replacing one piston for every heddle on the loom. I have 3,080 heddles on the loom.

It takes 13.75 seconds to replace a single piston. (Not that I timed it, of course 😉 ).The working position is so unergonomic that I can only work for about ten minutes at a time if I want to avoid back and wrist problems. So it is going to take 70-75 working sessions to replace all the pistons. At least a month, maybe two or three.

Oh well. To paraphrase the old saying, “A journey of 3,080 pistons begins with getting off your duff and doing it.” So I am.

However, everything is not dull and boring! To weave velvet, I got 480 spools of rayon embroidery thread, in 120 different colors. Four spools of each color.

I expected them to arrive in a nice neat box, organized by color. What I wound up with….was this.

That is not a small box, as you might think by looking at the picture. It’s a 55-quart box, and it’s about 3/4 full. A HUGE jumble, many in very similar colors.

How on earth was I going to pick out the four matching spools of each color from the jumble?

I decided to sort them all by color. Since I wanted to organize them by hue (red, yellow, blue, green, etc.) when I put them away, I started with a rough sort: all the pink/magenta spools in one area, all the yellows in another area, and so on. Then I sorted them by value (darkness). The human eye is very sensitive to values, so organizing a whole bunch of pink (etc.) spools by value went quickly as well.

In all it took me only 47 minutes (10 seconds per spool!) to organize everything. I thought you might find the process entertaining, so I recorded a video, at 15x speed so you can watch the whole process in just over 4 minutes. It’s strangely soothing.

Of course, in the grand tradition of jigsaw-puzzles, one spool turned up missing. It’s a green one. I imagine it’ll turn up someday…perhaps it has found a higher calling, as a cat toy!

January 7, 2024 by Tien Chiu

A brand-new year of weaving (and cats!)

Happy New Year, everyone!

After a bunch of errors too tedious to mention, I’ve got Grace up and weaving. So far it’s just the painted warp, but I’m working on the other one, too.

Here are the 880 knots in this warp. I didn’t lose a single knot while pulling through, which is amazing. Score one (more) for the knotter!

Here’s the new warp. I’m using this one to weave samples for an upcoming class:

The samples I’m weaving right now are illustrating the effects of weft color choices, weft size, and thread density (sett). They’re pretty simple, but I’ll be progressing towards more complex ones soon.

The velvet warp is not going so smoothly. It is fully tied on (thank you, knotter!), but I did something not-entirely-smart when I started pulling through, and as a result am having to pull each thread through individually – twice. All 1,320 of them.

So of course I barged ahead. But after doing about 200 of them, I started getting tendinitis/irritation from the repeated pinch-and-pull motion. I have a powerlifting meet coming up in just under three weeks, and I am NOT going to miss it with an arm injury! So I have stopped work on the velvet warp until things are completely healed, and am going to be careful afterwards. And doing massage, stretching, flossing, etc. (lots of etc.) to help it heal quicker.

On the powerlifting front, my wrestling singlet has arrived. This is mandatory wear for powerlifting meets, probably meant as an equalizer – wearing one makes EVERYONE look terrible! They are one-piece, skin-tight Spandex from the mid-thigh up. Unless you’re Chris Hemsworth playing the young Thor (yum!), it will make you look fat and lumpy. BUT, powerlifting (unlike bodybuilding) isn’t about looks, but about strength. The singlet enables the judges to determine more easily whether a lift is legal, so there you go.

Of course, I’ve elected to customize mine. For some *cough* strange reason, nobody sells 100% cotton wrestling singlets intended for dyeing. (Can you believe that???) But you can get custom print jobs, so this is the singlet I’ll be competing in:

I do need to get it shortened, though – it was clearly designed for someone much taller than me, so instead of mid-thigh, it comes down to my knees! That’s not legal for competition, so a friend is helping me shorten it tomorrow.

I’m super excited about this upcoming meet. It will be my second powerlifting meet ever, and it’s hosted by the gym I train at, so it will be on familiar ground. I have two goals for this meet:

lift as much as I can (a new PR – personal record – would be nice, but not necessary)
qualify for USPA Drug-Tested Nationals 2024, to be held in Las Vegas June 24-29.

Qualifying for Nationals isn’t going to be hard, assuming I don’t fall completely on my face. To qualify for Nationals, I’d only have to total 634 pounds between squat, bench press, and deadlift. My personal bests currently total 780 pounds. So as long as I don’t bomb out completely, I should qualify.

Since you get three tries at each lift, I’m planning to start with something very conservative, then go to match my personal bests, and if I get that lift, I’ll try to set some new personal records for myself.

One of the nice things about being over 50 is that nobody is watching you. All the intense scrutiny is on the 20- and 30-somethings lifting 600+ pounds (and may I say that Stefi Cohen is AMAZING?? There’s nothing more compellingly attractive than a woman who can lift 4.5x her body weight!). So, no pressure, just the chance to have fun and set some personal records.

(OK, I DO want to set some national records, but that probably won’t happen for a few years, at least.)

That’s it for now, but I’ll leave you with the Best Cat Photo of 2023: Fritz and Tigress demonstrating the lost art of Yin-Yang napping!

December 26, 2023 by Tien Chiu

A fabulous new tool: the Mesdan knotter!

Well! The new warp is dyed. This time, I got a little overenthusiastic with the dye, so while there are no white spots, there’s not much variation in color, either. It’s mostly deep navy blue, almost black, with a few lighter and a few darker spots, and some areas with hints of purple. That’s fine with me.

I am also shockingly far along in the warping process, thanks to a nifty new tool that is the best invention since duct tape (the wheel is sooooo 5000 BC). It’s a Mesdan fisherman’s knotter, and it looks like this:

It ties knots. Tight, secure knots with the ends neatly clipped off. A thing of beauty.

(There’s another, better-known-among-weavers, knotter, called the Boyce Weaver’s Knotter, which is now discontinued. You can get them on eBay, but they tend to be worn-out antiques from long-shuttered weaving mills. As a result, they also tend not to work. (I have four, none of which work, to prove it.))

My new Mesdan fisherman’s knotter, on the other hand, is another kettle of fish. This one is brand-new, purchased from A.B. Carter in North Carolina, and works 100% reliably. It has completely revolutionized my warping process. It also does my laundry, whitens my teeth, and irons my morning paper (or would, if I still got a physical newspaper!). PLUS, it slices my bread (take that, sliced bread!).

Well, maybe not quite ALL that…but close?

To put a new warp onto a jacquard loom, one ties each thread of the new warp to a thread of the old warp. This means one knot for every thread in the warp. And there can be a LOT of knots.

B.K. (Before Knotter), I tied all my knots by hand. This is every bit as slow and fussy as you might imagine, and also hard on the hands. By hand, I tie on at about 2 threads/minute. After an hour, I need to break for several hours because my thumbs get sore. So on a good day, working full tilt, I might be able to hand-tie 250 knots or so.

The two warps I’m putting on now require tying over TWO THOUSAND knots. 2,200, to be exact.

For obvious reasons, I was not looking forward to a week and a half of tediously hand-tying knots, followed by another two days of finding and fixing all the places where a knot let loose or a thread got tangled. NO FUN. (Sad face.)

Enter the Mesdan knotter. It ties tighter, much more secure knots than I can, with much less fussing. Lay two threads into the knotter, put them under light tension, pull the trigger, and voila! A nice, tight knot, with the ends neatly clipped off. I don’t even have to test it to make sure it’s secure, unlike my hand-tied knots.

It took me a while to figure out a setup that was both ergonomic and convenient. Here’s a pic of my setup, for anyone who’s interested in using one:

Mesdan Fisherman's Knotter mounted for tying new warps onto old

And here’s a video of the knotter in action (if you want to get the gory details of my setup, rewind to the beginning of the video, which explains everything).

Using this knotter, I tied on the ENTIRE painted warp in just a few hours! Four days of tedious, hard-on-the-hands work compressed into a single day. SO much faster. WAY more comfortable. And….dare I say it? Actually FUN!

Hard as it is to believe, this may even be niftier than blue tape.

Now I’m hard at work on the velvet warp. This one is going much more slowly, because it requires a precise sequence of threads that would be disastrous to get wrong. So I am checking each small group of threads six times, in six different ways, to make sure all is well. Nevertheless, it’s going faster than I would have believed possible. In only a day and a half, I’m already halfway done:

I expect to finish tomorrow or the day after, cutting my warping time from 14 days to 4 days and removing 90% of the tedium and frustration. WHOOPEE!!!! Warp speed ahead.

Meanwhile, I know pictures of your food are sooooo 2000’s, but we had a very tasty porchetta for Christmas dinner, and it was so beautiful I can’t resist sharing:

Pork belly, seasoned and tightly tied by The Fatted Calf in San Francisco, cooked in our sous vide cooker for 36 hours, and then deep-fried for 5-10 minutes to crisp the outside. SO GOOD.

And served with carrots, parsnips, and onions slathered in bacon fat, seasoned with thyme and pepper, and roasted slowly for 45 minutes:

Jamie made a pecan pie as well, but unfortunately I forgot to take a photo. Jamie says it was delicious, though!

The cats did not get porchetta for dinner, but they got extra cat treats and lots of snuggles. A lovely day, for all of us.

Happiness to all, whatever you celebrated!

December 19, 2023 by Tien Chiu

Setbacks in the search for velvet

I finally gave up rinsing, though I got enough of the blue out that the rinse water was only tinted. Then I beamed the warp onto the loom:

The trick of “crocheting” around the warp before dyeing seems to have helped. Despite a zillion rinses, the warp went on smoothly with a minimum of tangling and very few loose threads. Much better than other painted warps I’ve done before.

The warp is not perfect. As you can see in the photo, there are some undyed white bits where the warp stuck together and didn’t take the dye. They’re sprinkled throughout the warp, a few here and there, just enough to be truly irritating (and ruin perfection).

I’m pretty sure that the problem was too short a presoak, and/or not scouring (washing) the yarn prior to dyeing. I dumped it straight into a soda ash solution and painted it twelve hours later; the yarn clumped together and never got entirely wet. Because it was still dry in places, the dye didn’t absorb properly despite my best efforts. I should have known better; that’s what comes of rushing.

Now, the choice: leave the flawed warp on, or spend another week winding and dyeing a replacement?

If I were to weave this warp off, I’d have to either fix or cover up any white bits while weaving, which would be time-consuming and produce a less-than-perfect result.

If I were to discard it, I’d lose a week’s work and all the trouble that went into winding, dyeing, and endless rinsing. Plus the effort of putting the warp onto the loom!

Regret over lost time and effort, however, is not the best way to make decisions. Economists call this the “sunk-cost fallacy,” and it generally leads to throwing good resources (time, energy, money) after bad. We develop attachment to anything we’ve spent a lot of time and energy on, so often we waste MORE time and energy trying to “rescue” a failing project when walking away and starting over would make much more sense.

This applies to many things beyond weaving projects. For example, someone who got a law degree but then realized they hate practicing law, might feel they “ought” to stay in law because they spent a lot of time and effort getting that degree. And then spend the next 10-15 years as a lawyer, hating their job. Better to get out as soon as possible, so you aren’t suffering for more years or decades because you made a wrong decision earlier.

Seth Godin has an excellent method for overcoming the sunk-cost fallacy. Instead of thinking about the time and effort you’ve already put in, think of whatever you have now as a gift, freely given, from your past self. You can accept that gift…or say “Thank you, it’s not for me.”

So. Past Self gave me (thank you!) a warp that is dyed and on the loom, but which has flaws. Do I keep the gift, and spend another 200 hours working with it? Or do I politely decline, and start over?

I spent a couple days mulling this and decided to start over. The amount of time I’d spend twiddling with fixes is far greater than the cost of creating a new warp. I politely thanked Past Self for the gift, though. It was thoughtful of her to get the process started, even if her gift isn’t what I need right now.

So the new warp is wound, PROPERLY dyed, and in the rinse cycle. Hopefully the cycle won’t be endless this time!

Meanwhile, I have finished rinsing another warp. This one is destined to be samples (in many different colorways) for a class about painted warps. It’s 17 yards long, so that is a lot of weaving to do!

On the powerlifting front, some major successes. I’m testing my 1RMs this week. The 1RM is short for “one-rep max,” which is the most weight you can lift, just once. In August, my squat 1RM was 300 pounds. Today, I lifted 310! That is ten pounds of progress in just four months – that is amazing for someone who’s been lifting as long as I have. I LOVE my coach!

I had to fight like heck for this one, though. You can actually hear me say “nope” about halfway through to signal my spotters that I was not going to be able to lift it. Of course, as soon as I did, the weight FINALLY started moving. I’m glad they didn’t believe me!

310 pounds, of course, is 1,240 weasels, for those who remember my first powerlifting post in 2018. I was measuring weights in Standard Weasels (aka four ounces), and my long-term goal was just 700 weasels.

And now? The USPA national record for my age/weight class is only 325 pounds (1,300 weasels). I’d need to beat it by at least 5 pounds to set a new record, so my goal is 330 pounds, or 1,320 weasels.

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons — photo by Keven Law

December 10, 2023 by Tien Chiu

Velvet doodles

The velvet warp is now dyed and in the Eternal Rinse Cycle. I say “eternal” because I’ve been soaking/rinsing it for two and a half days now and small amounts of color are STILL coming out. Really dark blues are prone to bleeding, and this is an extremely dark blue, but still, this is ridiculous. I am considering boiling it with detergent as a “Take THAT!” measure, because I am eager to get on with putting on the warp.

Normally I wouldn’t worry about a teeny-tiny bit of bleeding (it generally doesn’t stick), but there’s some chance I might decide to use white for the pile, in which case even a little bleeding will be disastrous. And velvet is VERY time-consuming to weave, so weaving an entire piece and then discovering bleeding would be, well, tragic. I could always try weaving a sample to find out, but better to avoid bleeding entirely.

I am not, however, planning on using white, at least right now. I spent the morning playing with potential color combinations. With a two-color polychrome velvet warp, I get three warp colors: the foundation warp, pile warp #1, and pile warp #2. I also get all the mixes of any two warps, with the caveat that the blends will generally not be smooth.

Because I am constitutionally incapable of doing anything simple, I’ve been messing around with gradients in both polychrome warps. I spent the morning doodling up possible designs with different gradient combinations, and have settled on these two gradients for the pile:

blue to green to blue symmetric gradient

The foundation warp, of course, is already decided (mottled dark blue, black, and purple) and will look like this:

(That looks like pure black, especially on a white background, but it’s not. It has very subtle color changes.)

I can choose any one of these color sets, or mixes of each of them, to work with in my design.

Here are a few of my doodles:

orange and yellow phoenix on blue-green background

"sunset" on an alien blue-green sky with mottled black liquid splashing upwards

and my favorite:

"woven cloth" in a double color gradient

The combination of an asymmetric gradient and a symmetric one produces a far more interesting result than two symmetric or two asymmetric gradients. That was a surprise, but I’m really liking it.

These are just doodles, not serious work. I’m exploring the space of possible designs with these color combinations so I can choose colors. I haven’t yet figured out how to create those gradients, how many threads to wind together, or any of a host of other things. And when I start, I’ll likely start with a series of samples to fine-tune my setup before progressing on to actual designs.

But I’m really excited by the possibilities so far.

Some people, on the other hand, are upset about my dereliction of duty as I play around with possibilities. Clearly it is time to stop playing with velvet and do my One Job – catering to feline whims.

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