textiles | Tien Chiu's Blog

January 27, 2023 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Spring is coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So like I said: it feels like spring!

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

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

September 16, 2022 by Tien Chiu

Playing in the dye pots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue and rusty orange scrunch pattern tank top

Magenta-purple and green scrunch pattern tank top

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better living through chemistry!

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

June 12, 2021 by Tien Chiu

The weaving gods giveth, and…

….human error taketh away.

After about two hours of pulling through knots, I ran into a snag: the knots weren’t pulling through properly.

So I moseyed around to the back of the loom, where, much to my distress, I found this:

Somehow, I had managed to loop the orange warp around the black warp before starting to tie on.

Which meant that I had a major topological problem on my hands. To fix it, I was going to have to cut off, unloop, and retie that entire section of the orange warp, which meant about 2/3 of it. 880 knots, at least.

Since it was going to be difficult, fiddly, and error-prone to retie only the orange-warp knots and not the black-warp knots, it was probably going to be much safer to retie all of the warps on that side. 1,760 knots.

So I did the only reasonable thing, which was to put down the scissors, back slowly and carefully away from the loom, and go have a stiff drink. (Well, a cup of hot chocolate, anyway. I can’t drink alcohol – all it does is make me throw up. Which is a pity, because a couple shots of good whiskey were seriously called for.)

After a couple of days, I came back to the loom, spent a couple hours carefully pulling back and snipping out the knots I had just spent two months tying, un-looped the orange warp, and prepped the warp for re-tying.

Then I looked at the remaining tied-on warp and realized that there was a mis-ordering of the warp in that section as well. It’s a subtle problem, but you can see it in this photo:

As the warps come off the warp beam at the bottom, the black warp is on the inside. But as it passes over the back beam at the top, the black warp is on the outside. It’s twisted.

This might not actually be a problem if I removed the lease sticks holding the threading cross – the threads would straighten out their own ordering and all might be well (I’m not good enough at 3D visualization to tell). However, the lease sticks are my insurance against complete disaster should something turn out to be wrong with the threading. Had I removed the lease sticks before discovering the loop mentioned above, I would be throwing away the warp right now because I would have lost the separate threading cross for the two warps. So no way, no how am I giving up those lease sticks, at least not until I have woven and debugged the warp and made completely sure that everything is working.

However, that means I have to – you guessed it – retie the ENTIRE warp, not just two-thirds of it.

Time to put down the scissors, back away again, and go have an ice cream sundae. With hot fudge and whipped cream, dammit. (Hot chocolate wasn’t going to cut it this time.)

So here I am, two months’ work down the drain, starting over.

Oddly, I am not as discouraged as you might expect. I am also not engaged in self-recrimination. Twenty years of professional experience as a project manager has taught me that disasters happen, and also that there is no utility in pointing fingers when they do. The important part is doing damage control, figuring out how to recover from the disaster and proceed onwards, and (after all that is done) figuring out what happened and how to keep it from recurring. Twenty years of keeping teams from blowing up at each other in the middle of a crisis (and fending off angry executives) does teach one something about staying calm and carrying on.

So: damage control is done, I’ve figured out what needs to be done and am doing it. How it happened? Mostly, it happened because I’m not very good at spatial thinking, and I didn’t check carefully enough that there weren’t any loops or twists BETWEEN the two warp chains when I was setting them up. I’ve never beamed two warp chains onto the same warp beam before, and while I was very careful to make sure there were no twists in each warp chain, it didn’t occur to me that they could be twisted or looped around each other. I left the raddle lease sticks in because they weighted the warps nicely for threading, but they obscured my view of the warp, which meant that I didn’t see the loop in the warp until too late. As far as the left-hand twist went, I just didn’t notice it, or didn’t think it was important, until too late. Next time I know to look for it, and I’ll be much more careful about checking the entire path of the warp from the beam to the heddles while tying on.

I do, however, need something to motivate me while I spend (probably) another two months tying on again. So I’ve gone out and bought a couple new books to continue expanding my interest in folded forms. The one that’s currently exciting me is a book by Paul Jackson, Folding Techniques for Designers. Here’s a pic of the cover:

Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form

The whole book is filled with intriguing sculptural forms that can be folded from paper. I imagine I could use stiffened or stitched cloth to create similar sculptural forms. I’m planning to order some heavy bull denim and try starching it to see whether it would be suitable for folding. Or I may weave some 20/2 cotton cloth on the Baby Wolf and try using that for folding, until I can weave something on the jacquard.

I am not sure whether that is compatible with my California fire season theme, but at the moment I’m brainstorming ideas freely, so I’m not wedded to the California fire season theme either. I did see one or two forms that might work well with that theme, though, so I’m not ruling it out either.

So….major setbacks this week, but also some major sources of excitement. Onward and upward!

June 5, 2021 by Tien Chiu

Bursts of inspiration

At long last – and almost exactly two months after starting! – the Fire warp is tied on:

Due to a miscalculation on my part, I was 16 threads short at the right edge. No real problem; at 90 threads to the inch, that’s only about 1/6 of an inch. I’ll just leave those heddles out of the design. Somehow, I think 2,624 threads will be enough. 😉

Now it’s time to start weaving, right?

Not so fast. Now all 2,624 knots have to be pulled through the heddles. This is a slow and tedious process (since when was any jacquard process ever fast?), because, while you can’t really see it in the photo above, the tied-on threads look rather like a rat’s nest, all jumbled together. At a density of 90 threads per inch, pulled through teeny tiny heddle eyes, that poses quite a daunting tangle.

As a result, all 2,624 threads need to be pulled through, one by one. Yes, I said one by one. I’d love to do them all at once, as I gather you can do with thicker threads and bigger heddle eyes, but at 90 ends per inch and with my tiny heddle eyes, I’ve never been able to do it successfully without doing every thread separately. Cue another 8-10 hours of sitting there, pulling each thread individually.

And then! You get to do it AGAIN, because even after all that the threads aren’t perfectly aligned. They catch on each other as they go through, and wind on each other, and generally misbehave. So even after you’ve done it once, you have to go back and do it again to catch the strays. Again, a tedious process and I’d love to find shortcuts, but I haven’t found any yet. Slow weaving. You can see why I put on very long warps!

Here’s where I am now, after about two hours of work yesterday:

I forgot to mention that some knots will come undone partway through the process, and occasionally a thread will break. After tying a couple thousand knots, I’ve gotten VERY good at tying them, but I’ve had two or three give way or thread breaks so far. These will have to be found and fixed later.

This whole process, by the way, is MUCH faster on Grace, because she is threaded at only 60 ends per inch, and the threads are much thicker. Much of this pain is self-inflicted, by threading with fine yarns at 90 epi rather than 60. But, the results are beautiful and (hopefully) worth it.

Anyway, after both iterations of pulling through are done, I’ll have to sley the reed, and then it’ll be time to tie on, weave a short header, and begin debugging. Which means I am still a good 15-20 hours away from actual weaving. However, considering that I’m at least 30 hours into the process, being this close is a HUGE milestone! Super excited.

I’m also SUPER excited because being this close means I can start planning my project in earnest. I think I’ve decided on a theme for the project: the cycle of the California seasons and how the wildfires are getting worse in response to global climate change. And I’ve decided on an overall interpretation in cloth: cloth that changes color, going from green with orange flecks (poppies) to yellow to flaming orange to black ash and back to green again, in a cycle. The cycle repeats itself, with the green areas gradually getting smaller and yellower, and the orange and black areas getting bigger. And the format will be three-dimensional, I think, some sort of book format.

What that format is, I don’t yet know. I spent part of this morning paging through the book Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures, & Forms by Alisa Golden, looking for inspiration, and madly sticking in Post-Its wherever I found something interesting. I’m also thinking a kinetic origami sculpture has possibilities.

I’ve talked a bit about my theme. Here are my practical constraints for the format:

It needs to be easy for a conference to display. That means not overly large, especially if three-dimensional.
It needs to be shippable and not take up too much space for me to store afterwards. Collapsible would be really nice.
It needs to be static, since people won’t be able to touch it while it’s being displayed. So, they won’t be able to appreciate moving parts, or be able to flip the pages of a book (for example).
It needs to be describable in one photograph, two at most, since that’s all I get for the entry for a juried show.
The piece needs to stand on its own with just the title to explain. Not all fiber arts shows include artist’s statements – and most importantly, if I recall correctly, Convergence doesn’t.

These constraints mean I can’t do something like a bound book, because people can’t pick it up and flip the pages. I can’t make a long, skinny accordion book, because those read horizontally and are hard to display. (I can make a long scroll, because hanging vertically is easier than displaying horizontally.) I can make a pop-up book but I can’t make one where opening and closing the book is important to appreciating the pop-up.

In addition, I need to be careful about things where the front and back are both important, because it’s difficult to display those on a wall (where most items are hung in a show) and if you only get one photograph for a show entry, how are you going to show both front AND back in a single photo? (You can do a composite, sure, but most shows don’t allow any Photoshop work on the entry, so you’re dancing on thin ice there.)

But even within those constraints, there’s plenty of room for creativity. I’m planning to spend today exploring some of the possibilities. While pulling through another 600 threads or so.

Off to breakfast! Gotta pull threads while the sun shines.

May 30, 2021 by Tien Chiu

Fire cycles

After almost two months, I am alllllmost done tying on the Fire warp. 92.86% done, according to my calculations:

I’m so close I can practically taste it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I have found some weak threads – apparently not all of the 20/2 mercerized cotton was as strong as I thought it was. I’m hoping it doesn’t turn out to be a problem across the entire warp. If it turns out to be unweavable hara-kiri may be a serious possibility. Of course there are options for fixing weak warps post facto, but do I really want to risk getting hairspray or bits of warp sizing into those oh-so-tiny vacuum valves at the top of each heddle? Yikes.

Anyway, now that I’m close to finishing, I’m suddenly much more interested in laboring away at it. Two more inches of warp threads (about 180 threads) is about two hours’ work, so I should be able to finish that in the next day or two. After that it will be another eight or ten hours of pulling through, sleying the reed, and tying on. And then I can get to the delights of debugging! Given how little free time I have, it will probably be another 2-3 weeks before I can actually get to weaving. The sheer number of threads (2,640) in each of these warps gives “slow weaving” a whole new meaning.

Meanwhile, I have been seeking out and germinating seeds of new ideas. This time I have been browsing through Making Handmade Books by Alisa Golden, which is a collection of 100 book styles with instructions for making each. I came across this amazing and very simple book early on in the collection, and found it inspirational:

The structure is a single sheet of paper, cut down the center and cleverly folded so that the bottom half folds into the “book”, then the top half folds abruptly up and becomes the three-dimensional “pop-up” on the right side.

This made me think of rolling hills, tall trees, and towers of flame. Fire has been much on my mind lately, as it has been for many Californians. The terrible drought is now in its second year, and we got so little rain this past year that some wildfires have already started – and we’re not even out of spring yet. Typically spring is the growing season, when the hills are green; in summer the hills dry out and turn to gold. Fire season is in the fall, when everything has died and dried out. So wildfires in May are virtually unheard of – and a terrible sign, both individually and of the effects of climate change.

The folds of paper reminded me of the rolling, grassy hills, covered with flowers (orange California poppies) in spring, then turning golden in summer, and then in fall, sometimes changed abruptly into towers of flame with wildfire. Then, in winter, the rains come, softening the blackened burn scars, and seeds germinate and the cycle starts again. If there’s enough water. Lately, there hasn’t been, and with climate change, it will likely only get worse.

So this has been much on my mind.

Anyway, after a short internal debate familiar to every crafter (“You’re going to use this precious paper for WHAT?” “What, you’re going to save it and never use it for anything?” “Shouldn’t you keep it for better stuff?”), I decided to use some of the Japanese paper samples I’d bought to build some sketches of what I was thinking. I’m not good enough at drawing to sketch it out, I didn’t want to lose the idea, and I didn’t have cheap construction paper on hand to build a model with. I also felt that the idea would be better expressed if I weren’t trying to do it with third-grader materials.

There is always a tension between “saving the good stuff for quality work” and “disrespecting your investment of time and skill as an artist by using shoddy materials”. For finished work, I am strongly on the side of working with the best quality materials you can afford. For initial sketches, though, I will often work with cheaper materials if they get me the same answer. In this case I felt I could think better if I were using better quality materials, even if it were just a sketch. I like to follow my creative instincts, so Japanese paper it was.

Here’s the little model I built:

Model of art piece, built with Japanese paper

As you can see, it looks more or less nothing like the book in the photo, except in overall layout. On the left, you have the rolling green hills in spring; they’re dotted with bright orange California poppies (the scraps of orange paper), which are also the state flower of California. Of course, they are also the color of fire, so in some sense they symbolize the idea that fire is built into the land, is part of the natural cycle of the seasons.

As the seasons progress to the right, the hills dry out and become golden yellow, then yellow-orange. In fall, there’s an abrupt shift, and a shift in direction, as the cloth gets folded up and the flip side of the cloth becomes visible. The cloth bursts up into giant flames, which dwindle down and become skeletal ash covering the hills. Green sprouts appear on the ash-covered hills, which then slowly green over the winter, renewing the cycle.

This is, of course, just the seed of an idea, the beginning of a story. There are a ton of loose ends in this little sketch that need to be sorted out. For example: With all the wavy bits, is this still a book? If not, why retain the folded format? Is it relevant to what the piece is “saying”? Does the right-angle turn in the direction of the piece at the right side serve a thematic purpose? (I think it kinda does, because it adds emphasis to the idea of “bursting into flame,” but that warrants closer examination.)