Tien Chiu

You are here: Home / Archives for All blog posts / textiles

by Leave a Comment

Capstone

I’m on the plane home to San Jose after visiting my wedding dress in the Fabric of America exhibit at The Henry Ford. It was an amazing experience. I’m still processing it.

Part of it was seeing my dress mounted as part of a featured exhibit at a major museum. I spent a good chunk of time just standing in the exhibit, staring at my dress surrounded by other amazing works, not believing that it had been chosen for the exhibit. (Pinch me!) But I had to admit to myself that it held its own, even in such illustrious company. People were stopping to look at it and gasping, “It’s so beautiful!”

But a lot of it was just the trip down memory lane. So many memories! Not just the making of the dress, or the wedding, but also of nearly 20 years spent with A, and how we both evolved over the course of our two decades together.

Our first date, in 2006, at Coupa Cafe, Palo Alto. Somehow, the topic of food came up, and I mentioned a Miss Manners quote that I loved: “Food is so important to American romance that if there’s no food, it isn’t a date.”

We talked for hours, and eventually I suggested that we go across the street to Nola’s for dinner. A. looked at me and said, “Does this mean this is now a date?” I laughed and said yes.

Four years later. We were settling in comfortably together. Weaving was my latest hobby – I’d taken it up shortly after A. and I got together, and I loved it.

I’d signed up for a workshop with legendary weaving teacher Sharon Alderman about designing fabric for a specific purpose. I was racking my brains trying to think of something so complicated and difficult that I’d need Sharon Alderman’s advice for it. Eventually I decided on the most challenging thing I could think of: a handwoven wedding dress. I figured “I’m only 40-ish. I’ll probably get married at SOME point – if not to A, then to someone else, eventually. And I love the idea of making my own wedding dress from fabric I wove myself.”

I designed a set of samples that I thought would be appropriate. I wanted to incorporate symbolism into the fabric (which would also make it more interesting to weave!), so I spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to render the double-happiness Chinese character in a 24-shaft draft. (I’d only just started designing my own drafts, so this was quite a stretch.)

Here’s the draft:

(The “double happiness” character symbolizes a happy marriage. It’s the character for “happiness” written twice, then merged into a single character. I can’t imagine a better way to express “happy relationship” than that.)

I also became fascinated by the eternity knot, also called the Buddha’s knot.

So I designed an eternity-knot draft, too.

I went to the workshop and Sharon helped me create my samples:

I returned home and blogged about my samples, being careful to say, “A and I are not engaged – this is a strictly theoretical wedding dress!”

Well. A. read my blog, came by my craft room, and said, “You know, I really wouldn’t mind being married to you….”

Not the most romantic proposal, but the wedding was on!

It took me an entire year to make the dress. I wasn’t a very experienced weaver, so I made a ton of mistakes, including one egregious one that forced me to re-weave ten full yards of fine silk fabric. (I still describe the dress as “the triumph of obstinacy over ignorance”. Setback after setback, but I. Would. Not. Quit.)

I eventually wove a total of 32 yards of fabric – 16 for the coat, and 16 for the dress. (Plus the ten yards that I had to discard!)

I also wanted to use couture sewing techniques, about which I knew absolutely nothing. After a long search, I found Sharon Bell, an experienced couture seamstress and former dean of a fashion school. At each stage, she showed me what to do, and I did it. She was the brains behind the wedding dress! We became fast friends in the process. I still miss her.

Sharon with the finished dress

So much else went into the dress. My mother-in-law bought me two yards of imported Alencon lace at Britex Fabrics after she saw me looking longingly at it but frowning at the price tag. I cut the lace into individual motifs and appliqued each motif separately to the bodice of the dress to get the design I wanted.

Tiny, almost invisible stitches, a lot of them. Five rows of stitching, four done by hand, in the hem of the dress. Sharon laughing at me when I fretted over a small piece of fabric that I had to add near the bottom of the dress because the fabric was too narrow for one panel. “Don’t worry – the guy on the floor looking at your hem is going to be too drunk to care!”

The dress took an entire year, working in every spare moment, to complete. I estimated over 1,000 hours spent working on the dress and coat, start to finish.

When I put the last stitch in, I set it down on the table, looked at it, and realized: this is a masterpiece.

I had done interesting work, even beautiful work, before, but nothing with this scope, ambition, or perfection. It was (and still is) closer to perfection than anything else I’ve ever made. It was a tribute to my two loves, craft and A.

The wedding went beautifully, except that my mother, who had flown out for the event, was briefly hospitalized and couldn’t attend. So we left the reception early and flew through the hospital in full wedding regalia to visit her in the hospital. We got quite a few odd looks in the hallway!

Fast forward a few more years. The curator at the American Textile History Museum reached out to me – she was looking for wedding dresses with interesting stories for an exhibit she was putting together, and someone had told her about my dress and its saga. I was delighted to see it in their exhibit Behind the Veil: Brides and their Stories.

I was even more delighted a little while later, when the ATHM acquired it for their collection. I had worried what would happen to the dress when I passed – I have no children, and the idea of it going to an estate sale was heartbroken. I was excited to know that it would have a permanent home.

Alas, the American Textile History Museum closed a few years later. That precipitated a nail-biting year as they worked on transferring their collection to other institutions. I had no idea what was going to happen to my dress – whether it would go to another museum, be sold, or (heaven forbid) discarded. Nobody could (or would?) tell me anything. I tried to be patient and philosophical, without much success.

I was delighted to hear, a year later, that most of the costume collection (including my dress) had gone to The Henry Ford Museum. The Henry Ford is a major and well-funded institution, so it would be safe there.

I didn’t think much about the dress for the next ten years. Life went on, with twists and turns. My marriage took a sharp turn around 2020, when A. came out as transgender. Instead of a husband, I suddenly had a wife.

We stayed together for another five years. I helped her through her early years of transition. Some of it was fun – I got to show her how to put on pantyhose, and helped her pick out colors for her new clothes. Some of it was much harder, like helping her navigate the change from cis man to trans woman. Suddenly she went from the top of the social pecking order to near the bottom. When we were out and about, I often accompanied her to bathrooms because she was terrified of being attacked by anti-trans bigots for the “crime” of using the ladies’ room.

There were other transformations that had to be made, like reshaping her self-identity. To give you some idea of the magnitude of this, think back to all the experimentation that probably happened in your teen years. What did you wear and what did it say about you? Who did you hang out with, who was your tribe? How did you relate to other people?

So much of society is hard-coded around “what men do” and “what women do”. We cis people spend the first seventeen or eighteen years of our lives learning what it means to be a man or a woman in our society, both externally and internally. For someone who transitions in midlife, all that learning and identity shift has to be concentrated into a few short years. That would be incredibly difficult even if trans people weren’t the target of so much hatred.

So it was difficult for A. It was tough for me too, because waking up one morning and discovering that your husband is actually your wife is a bit of a shock.

We navigated that transition with considerably more grace than anyone (including us) could have expected, but after five or six years it became clear that we really were headed in different directions. For us to continue growing, we needed to live separate lives.

So we spent last year working out the divorce, home sale, move. She went to Seattle; I spent three months in Mexico before returning to San Jose. We’re still friends, and text each other daily, but we’re no longer partners.

Then the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles decided they’d like to exhibit my wedding dress in their show Soft Sculptures at the end of 2026. So I wrote to The Henry Ford to ask if they would consider loaning my dress to SJMQT. They replied to say “Yes, but we’re actually exhibiting it this summer, so they might have to wait until the exhibit closes in the fall.”

WHAT???? I had had absolutely no inkling that it was to be in the exhibit. I was delighted – I had honestly never expected to see it again. The Henry Ford has over a million items in their collection, far more than can ever be exhibited. For them to pick out my dress from that enormous collection seemed unimaginable. I was happy just knowing that it was safe in a collection.

So I wangled an invitation to the exhibit reception, and bought plane tickets.

And there I was, looking at my dress. 15 years since I made it. So many changes, so many twists and turns. And in some way immortal now, safe in a museum collection.

I don’t expect I’ll ever see the dress again, except maybe briefly at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles exhibit. Museums generally don’t show the same item over and over, so I expect that by the next time it’s exhibited I’ll have long passed. So this trip was really a capstone to the entire wedding era.

So much time…so many memories.

by Leave a Comment

Back at (creative) work

I finished my hand-dyed bed linens, and they are fantastic! Here are the sheets:

And here is the blanket (plus Pepper the Professional Photobomber!):

Here’s what it looks like with the sheets turned properly down:

I LOVE it!

I’m planning on doing a second set of sheets, this one in blues and greens to match the blanket. More pictures once those are done! I may wind up mixing the sheet sets to have one blue sheet and one orange sheet in each set. Or maybe not. Stay tuned!

I’ve also gotten started on weaving stuff. (FINALLY!) You may or may not recall the series I’m working on, Unraveling. It’s a series of five images that starts with a woman screaming, woven in black and white, with the fabric slashed and frayed to reveal a layer of magenta cloth beneath the surface. Here’s the image I’m planning to weave – obviously it doesn’t have the double weave bottom layer or the slashes in it yet, but those are coming!

In the next frame, she reaches up a hand to her face and begins unraveling the frayed cloth, revealing a magenta mass of threads underneath. Here’s an “artist’s concept” (as they say) of what that might look like.

The next frame shows her as an unraveled mess of magenta thread, very loosely arranged in the shape of a face:

In the next frame, she is starting to put herself back together: a cocoon with a serene face

And, finally, the last frame shows her serene, with the magenta integrated, a single layer of cloth.

I handspun 1800 yards of superfine (the size of sewing thread) thread on a drop spindle while I was in Mexico, and will be using it in the magenta layer. It’s the “through line,” literally the thread that runs through the entire piece. It’s magenta because, on our last day in the old house, I arrived just before dawn to find a beautiful magenta glow in the sky over the home we were leaving behind:

After discussing the matter with Claude and doing some Googling for myself, I think those must have been the Northern Lights – the color is right and I can’t think of any other explanation. But it is practically unheard of to see the Northern Lights in the Bay Area, and to have that light up the sky on the last day in our old home? I took it as an omen, and I carried it with me all through my travels to Mexico. I literally spun it into a thread of continuity and contemplation:

I haven’t been able to work on the fabric design because I’ve had equipment issues (my pen display broke), but I should be able to start by the end of the week.

That may be getting ahead of myself, though. I need to set up the jacquard loom before I start weaving, and that’s gonna take a while. I have 1,320 heddles to thread, then debug (finding and fixing all the mistakes), before I can weave. I also want to replace 1,100 heddles with more durable ones. Finally, I need to wind and beam the warp for the project before I start threading. That’s a lot of infrastructure work, but it needs doing. And if you have to do something long and tedious, best to start right away. So I began winding the warp this afternoon. Forward ho!

The Megado? I have a project in mind for her, but I can’t finish designing it until I get that pen display. Soon, I hope!

By the way, I have decided to christen the Megado “Lady Lovelace” (after Ada Lovelace, of course). My jacquard loom is “Amazing Grace” (after pioneering software legend Grace Hopper). So now I have Lady Lovelace and Amazing Grace – which really ought to be the name of a rock duo. (Think I can get the Indigo Girls to change their name? 😉 )

And, of course, because no blog post would be complete without kittens, here are Nutmeg and Pepper, training for the North American Mixed Martial Arts championships! (All in fun – they chase each other all over the house almost every day, and there’s never any hissing. And all that kitten energy! They’re so much fun to watch.)

And all snuggled up afterwards.

They’re just over nine months now, and weigh as much as adult cats, so perhaps I should stop calling them kittens. But honestly? They’ll always be kittens to me.

by Leave a Comment

Water lily design, finished

I finished designing the water-lily napkins a few days ago. I’m very pleased with them:

handwoven water lily napkin design on four shafts (overshot)

For reference, here’s the original painting:

Monet painting, inspiration for the handwoven water lily napkins

I’m particularly happy because it’s a four shaft pattern, which means that more people are able to weave it. There’s a myth that in order to do complex, interesting work you have to have a more complex, expensive loom with lots and lots of shafts – this shows you can do it on a much simpler, four-shaft loom.

This is important because I intend to get these published in a magazine, so the design has to be weavable by their readers. I kept this in mind while designing. It will be easier to weave on six shafts than four, but it’s doable on four.

I then got interested in what you could do in plain weave (e.g. a on a rigid heddle loom). So I designed this water-lily alternate interpretation – place mats in plain weave. I’m quite happy with these as well: they’re not as pictorial as the first set of water-lilies, but I think they capture the feel and the overall motion of the painting. And MUCH quicker and simpler to weave.

I might make the design a little smaller, though, so it’s more practical to weave with thicker threads, which would be more suitable to rigid heddle weaving.

handwoven water lily place mat design in plain weave

At some point I might design and weave a full set of table linens – place mats, napkins, and table runner – in the more complex water-lily pattern. Not sure though – it would be a LOT of work, and I almost never entertain.

On to the next design!

I have been thinking about what else to put on Grace (the jacquard loom). I want to put on a warp that is guaranteed to be long enough for Unraveling, which probably means at least four yards (after subtracting loom waste). However, Unraveling itself is only two yards long, so that probably leaves quite a bit of leftover warp. What to do with it?

I’m thinking VELVET.

Velvet and I dated briefly about 8-10 years ago, when I took a velvet weaving workshop with Barbara Setsu-Pickett. I fell in love, but velvet played hard-to-get and eventually I gave up. It requires specialized equipment and a LOT of time, and I didn’t have either.

However, some very generous friends helped me build the necessary equipment, and I think I will now have the time to experiment with it. So my plan is to put on a long warp in black 60/2 silk. Once Unraveling is done, I can swap out the pink threads for velvet pile, and (potentially) weave polychrome figured velvet on the loom.

This sounds SO incredibly fun! Also complicated and time-consuming. I expect that getting to the point where I weave any finished pieces will take at least a year. But SO worth it when I do. And it will make a fun adventure. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.

My other interest right now is, oddly, natural dyeing. I investigated natural dyeing a bit back in college – which is to say, over 30 years ago – but soon gave it up for synthetic dyes, which gave me a wider range of colors with much better reproducibility.

However, after doing Renewal, the scarf woven out of handspun silk, I got fascinated by the idea of combining ancient techniques with my thoroughly modern jacquard loom. This is unusual for me – usually I’m all about producing a great finished product. What materials you use and how you get there aren’t relevant to the finished piece, which stands by itself.

Lately I’ve gotten interested in the process, though, so I’m liking the idea of using natural dyes for at least some of my yarns.

Towards that, I’m taking a natural dye workshop with a Mexican weaver/dyer this week. I found her on AirBNB of all places – she was advertising a half-day “learn to do simple weaving” workshop, and I signed up for it because I thought it would be interesting to meet her. We hit it off, and eventually agreed that she’d teach me in a three-day class on natural dyeing using traditional Mexican techniques. It’s just me, so we’ll have plenty of time to talk about the technical aspects. It starts later this morning – I’m super excited and expect to learn a lot.

Marcelo (the knife-maker) and I have been talking about the Damascus steel knife set he’s making for me. He proposed using a Japanese technique, shou sugi ban, on pecan wood for the knife handles. With shou sugi ban, you basically char the wood and then rub away the char. It brings up the grain and (reputedly) also makes the wood more durable, though that’s been disputed.

On softwoods like pine, shou sugi ban produces dramatic results, with strong bands of light and dark, following the grain. On hardwoods such as pecan, the result is much more subtle – but subtle will go well with the patterning in Damascus steel.

Marcelo sent me a photo of a sample he created using shou sugi ban. The left photo shows the charred wood before and after sanding, and the second photo shows what the finished wood will look like.

I love it.

We’re also talking about other details – what to use for the rivets going through the handle (bronze, I think), and whether to inset a small gemstone in the center rivet (yes). Marcelo suggested chrysocolla, which is a blue-green semiprecious gemstone similar to turquoise or malachite, and I agreed. I can’t wait to see the samples.

Off to my natural dye workshop! More later.

by Leave a Comment

Water lilies

I’ve been in Mexico for a month and a half now. In that time, surprisingly, I’ve done almost no exploration of my surroundings. That’s because most of my voyaging has been internal – so Mexico is mostly serving as a place to cocoon. (I’d like to come back sometime when I’m actually interested in exploring!)

What’s changed?

Mostly, I’ve been listening to the silence. Helping my wife through her transition took a lot of energy and emotional space. I don’t blame her for that, but now that I’m not so intensively involved, I’m enjoying the silence of a house entirely to myself – of having “a room of her own,” as Virginia Woolf so famously put it. No cats, no spouse, no responsibilities to anyone else. That’s precious, and I’ve been enjoying it. I can feel myself decompressing.

The other major change is that I’ve committed to putting my creative life first. First thing in the morning, as soon as I get up, I’m spending at least an hour on my creative work. Early morning is my best time of day for me – most alert, most creative, most courageous – and “paying myself first” ensures that my creative work gets the time it needs. If it waits until everything else is done, it never happens – that’s what’s been happening the last ten years. Enough.

As a result, I’ve actually started creating again. That’s HUGE. Ideas and designs for new work are pouring out, and I expect to start weaving some really cool stuff once I get home. Probably in February – January will get eaten by moving and studio setup logistics.

But meanwhile, I am creating again.

Since the next step in Unraveling requires equipment I don’t have here, and I don’t want to launch another jacquard project to distract me from Unraveling, I’ve started designing projects for shaft looms.

I’m considering teaching a class at the Handweaving Academy about designing from a photo. That’s something lots of people would love to do, and it can be tricky, so I think it’s a worthy topic for a class.

So I’ve spent the last few days designing a piece inspired by this Monet painting:

I picked this one because I’m thinking of doing a series of photos with vastly different styles, to give examples of how to create different effects and moods. To start, I wanted a photo with subtle color blends and blurry edges.

I searched Handweaving.net’s draft collection and found an overshot draft that reminded me of flowers and rippling water (#61448, by Gerd Lindman Nilsson).

I set to work.

Because the original photo has a lot of blues, greens, and whites in it, I decided to make the background blue-green and the lilies mostly white. I had a lot of options for color – overshot consists of a ground cloth (tabby) plus a pattern weft. That meant that I could create stripes of color lengthwise (warp) and TWO different color patterns crosswise (pattern + tabby weft). Lots of potential (and also very complicated).

My first explorations produced this:

This would be a nightmare to weave, but I thought it captured the spirit of the lilies nicely. Each lily is slightly different, which I felt created a more flowing, painterly effect.

I decided I wanted to explore color combinations in greater depth, so I spent a half-day yesterday creating this monstrosity:

This is obviously not intended as a final design. What it does do, however, is set up all the color patterns that I might want to use, making it easier to experiment with colors later. I’ve set up color gradients in the warp and both wefts, each composed of different colors. So experimenting with color combinations becomes easy – I simply use Handweaving.net’s Draft Editor to replace the colors in each section, so it takes only a minute or two to swap in different colors.

After I finished creating this color template (which took several hours – it’s complicated!), I started fiddling with color replacements. By bedtime, I’d gotten to this design, which I like (and which would be much simpler to weave!).

This isn’t a finished design – I want to tone down the pink a LOT (the painting’s lilies are mostly white), reduce the saturation, darken the blue/green areas, make the colors cooler, and quite a few other tweaks. (I liked the colors in the first version better.) But overall, I like where I’m going.

(This version is also much easier to weave, which is important because I’m thinking of submitting it to a magazine – it needs to be within reach for most weavers!)

I’m envisioning a set of napkins, in 10/2 cotton with a doubled 10/2 cotton pattern weft. Using two strands of yarn, side by side, opens up the possibility of using two different colors together for even more subtle blends. It might also enable me to simplify the weaving without compromising the painterly feel.

Once I’m satisfied with the colors, I’ll have to go home and test the real-life yarn colors in the design. For now, I can fiddle with theoretical colors on the screen, to see what overall color combinations I like best. Then sample and finalize the design once I’m home.

I fly home in just under three weeks, so my sojourn is nearing it’s end. I’m good with that – I’ve enjoyed my trip, and the solitude, but I feel like I’m almost done cocooning. I’m ready to weave again.

by Leave a Comment

Unraveling (Or, Pilgrim’s Progress)

I’m making rapid conceptual progress on Pilgrimage. I’ve changed it considerably since yesterday.

I was really struggling with the center panels of Pilgrimage, which are about wandering. I couldn’t seem to figure out how to reconcile the idea of the inner struggle and transformation with an external journey and external challenge – at least, not in a way that satisfied me. So I had a long back and forth with ChatGPT (which is very good at brainstorming) and together we arrived at the concept of a different-but-same series, Unraveling.

Unraveling starts and ends at the same place as Pilgrimage – the screaming head to start, and the serene head at the end. However, it’s now about the deliberate choice to unravel the self you are in order to transform into something and someone new.

I also decided to make Unraveling much more weaverly. Pilgrimage was basically going to use the jacquard as a low-resolution printer, which is certainly doable but which is probably the least interesting use of a jacquard loom. (If you’re going to print it, print it.) I like the use of the medium much better in Unraveling.

But perhaps I should actually show you what I’m thinking!

Instead of a flat image of a face shattering, Unraveling opens with a face screaming, with portions of the face slashed and frayed to reveal magenta threads underneath. (The fabric is woven in double weave, one layer for the face and a loose, gauzy bottom layer of magenta cloth.)

In the next panel, the face lifts a hand and starts deliberately unraveling itself, pulling threads out to decompose itself into a tangle of magenta threads. It doesn’t look exactly like this, but you can get the rough idea:

This unraveling of the face isn’t a photo, though – instead, the fabric in the face is literally cut and unraveled, revealing a loosely woven magenta layer of cloth underneath, also partially unraveled.

In the next panel, the face has been unraveled completely into a mass of disorganized magenta threads, with just the suggestion of a face. The way I’m visualizing it inside my head doesn’t look much like this representation, but you can kinda get the idea.

Then, in the next panel, you see the face reweaving itself, thread by thread, integrating the frayed magenta threads into finished cloth. (No visual for this one yet.)

And then, at the end, you see the completely rewoven face, now with the magenta integrated and the face calm.

I like this story arc. I think I’m going to make it into a piece that is about 14 x 70″, which will fit into most exhibition size limits, and enable me to do five square panels 14″ x 14″. I wouldn’t mind making the panels a little wider, but for practical reasons 13-14″ is a good size. It would only require one module width on my TC-2 (14.5″), which makes warping faster, wastes less work, and allows me to weave something else on the rest of the loom.

While this work is emphatically not created by ChatGPT, it has been an essential part of the development process. It’s basically been the very patient person who’s willing to listen to you babble all day long about your project, offer suggestions, and not take it personally when you ignore all of them and go off on a totally different tangent. (My friends are patient, but they’re not that patient. Actually, neither am I.)

What I’ve found about working with AI is that it isn’t a replacement for a human being – it’s an amplifier. If you don’t think of it as an all-powerful, always-right being, but instead as a thought partner to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off, and to create the sketches you don’t have the skills to make, it can be a very powerful tool. It’s not a replacement for human judgment or creativity, but it can amplify what you do with them.

Anyway, I’m quite pleased with how Unraveling (nee Pilgrimage) is going, and I’m looking forward to refining the design and getting it ready to sample on the loom (once I get back).