surface design

March 24, 2015 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

A quicker way of carving stencils

Things have been moving so fast the last two days, it’s hard to know where to start!

I’ve decided to have a play day on Saturday, doing more katazome with my friend Alfred. I thought it would be interesting to carve more stencils, but wasn’t looking forward to spending hours hunched over a cutting mat. Fortunately, there was an alternative…I broke out a Silhouette Cameo cutting machine (meant for scrapbooking) that I had bought a month or two ago, and tried using it to cut the katazome stencil paper. It is amazing. I tried cutting some very delicate and detailed stencils with it, and it performed with flying colors. Here are some photos of the stencils I made yesterday (click for the bigger photo):

katazome stencils - fish and peacock — katazome stencils – fish and peacock

I am particularly impressed by the bottom one, the two flying phoenixes. The faint lines are actually rows of dots almost too tiny to see, maybe 1/32″ in diameter. The cutter cut them out perfectly. There are a number of defects in the design, but they are Adobe Illustrator file errors – the cutting is absolutely perfect. I can’t wait to develop and cut my own stencil designs.

I’m continuing work on the second qiviut scarf – I wove about a foot on it today. I’m being careful because I’m having a (very mild) physical relapse, with some swelling and barely detectable bleeding. I understand now why my primary physician was adamant about not going back to work too soon! I have full mental energy, thankfully, but my body is definitely still healing. And I’m taking lots of naps, which should help speed up the recovery.

I’ve just about finished the book on Adobe Illustrator, and feel much more comfortable with the tool now. Unfortunately, I still can’t draw, which is hampering my efforts at design. So I’ve decided to fix that. I am going to spend the next fifteen days working through Claire Watson Garcia’s Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, one chapter a day. That will hopefully get me the fundamentals; after that, it’s a matter of practice. I probably won’t have time to make a habit of it, but anything would be better than complete ignorance.

I’m continuing to work on the book – an hour a day for now, but soon ramping up to two or three. I’m also exploring Marian Stubenitsky’s book Echo and Iris, which is (roughly) about structures you can weave on an extended parallel threading. I spent half this afternoon concocting a monstrosity of a drawdown – a tied weave with an echo weave ground cloth. (Four echoes, on a divided parallel threading. Shafts 1-10 and 21-30 contained the ties, shafts 11-20 and 31-40 contained the pattern. The echo weave ground cloth, of course, was woven on all 40 shafts.) I did get it to work, structurally speaking, but the resulting draft wasn’t very attractive. No matter; it was a learning tool, and it worked. I have a better understanding of Photoshop design, tied weaves, and echo weave now.

It probably sounds as if I’m diving into way too many things, but I’m really enjoying exploring multiple areas at once. One of the secrets to my productivity is simply having a great variety of activities – there’s always something to suit my mental and physical energy level, whatever it may be. And being home all day allows me to devote my full mental power to exploring. I have three more weeks away from work while my body heals, and I plan to make the most of them. So much to do, so little time!

December 20, 2014 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Tjaps!

I got an email a week or so ago from Dharma Trading Company, letting me know that a shipment of tjaps had arrived! So I immediately dropped everything, went to the site, and spent the next twenty minutes paging through 400 beautiful designs.

But what is a tjap, you ask? It’s a copper stamp used in Indonesian batik to apply hot wax to fabric. The wax acts as a resist, so when you dye the fabric later, the stamped pattern emerges. That pattern can be very complex. But beyond their utilitarian function, tjaps are beautiful! I have been guiltily collecting them, especially the rarer animal designs. Here are the five I bought:

I confess that I have never successfully used a tjap with wax. When I’ve tried, the images come out blurry, the wax runs all over, and the end result looks atrocious. But with five more beauties in my collection, I will have to try again! But even if I can’t make it work with wax, they can be used in all sorts of other ways.

Speaking of things that can be used in all sorts of other ways, my modest little design wall – foam covered in flannel – seems to have been repurposed by a certain way-too-beautiful-and-mischievous cat as a climbing wall. Here she is, making her way up the wall:

Alarmingly, she was after the pins I had left stuck in the wall. She loves to pull pins out of things and drop them on the floor – apparently it’s the best game ever! But the spoilsport human immediately dropped everything, took out all the pins, and put them away. Game over. (Whew! A trip to the vet would have been no fun at all.)

December 10, 2014 by Tien Chiu 7 Comments

Tsujigahana kimono

I’m a big fan of Itchiku Kubota, who made fabulous kimono in the tsujigahana style. Tsujigahana combines shibori (tied-resist) dyeing with hand-painted motifs, usually flowers. Kubota took this method to jaw-dropping heights – so much so that his work is my personal inspiration. If I can make something as beautiful as his “Symphony of Light” kimono, I’ll consider my life a success. (I wrote a blog post about Kubota a few years back, if you want to know more.)

Though Kubota’s work is out of my price range, I’ve been looking for a piece in the tsujigahana style for awhile. It’s complicated, because in Japan, “tsujigahana” also describes a design style rather than a specific method – which means there are many imitations using other methods (woven, embroidery, printed) and the imitations can be quite good. John Marshall has been helping me sort the real from the fake.

Last week I finally came across a kimono that John and I both thought was real, and where I liked the overall design. So I bought it online, and spent the next week biting my nails waiting for its arrival. The package finally arrived yesterday, and I tore it open, to find that it was even more beautiful than the online photos! And it is definitely genuine.

So I spread it out for photos, and naturally the first thing that happened was this:

After gently shooing away my beautiful kitty, I tried taking photos of the full kimono. I couldn’t do it justice with my cell phone, but here’s my best effort:

tsujigahana kimono - full view — tsujigahana kimono – full view

And here are some closeups:

tsujigahana kimono sleeve — kimono sleeve

You might wonder how the makers handle seams – how do you get the two pieces to harmonize perfectly across the seam, like this?

precisely aligned seam on tsujigahana kimono — precisely aligned seam on kimono

In some cases the answer is to dye the garment (seams and all) after sewing, which is what I suspect happened on this seam because of how perfectly the shibori pattern lines up. However, there are also cases where the pieces are dyed separately, with a little extra on either side. This can result in imperfect overlap, like so:

tsujigahana kimono closeup — seam showing not-quite overlapped designs

Around then, help reappeared, and I gave up on taking more photos, since it was obviously time to pet the cat:

I’m very pleased to have the kimono! I’ve been thinking about what to do with it. I haven’t got room to display the whole piece at home (not to mention what the feline assistants would do to it), so I’m thinking I might remove one sleeve and pin it up in my cubicle. It’s not nearly as nice as seeing the whole thing, but at least this way I’ll be able to see it daily.

Meanwhile, some other wonderful packages have arrived. This lovely 4-quart All-Clad saucepan came a day or two ago, a gift from my in-laws:

Of course I had to try it out immediately, so this morning I inaugurated it with the beginnings of some yuzu marmalade:

My other package will come in handy for the marmalade. Here is my Christmas gift to myself:

It’s a solid copper preserving pan – designed for making jams and jellies (and marmalades!). Copper conducts heat efficiently and evenly, and the sloping-outward sides encourage quick evaporation. It’s a large pot – 10″ at the base and almost 16″ at the top – which also makes for quick evaporation of excess liquid.

It’s also beautiful, especially from the outside, as it is hammered copper – which you can see a bit on the inside but is much more prominent outside. I’ll take another photo tomorrow, when I take it down to finish cooking the marmalade.

I’m actually making two batches of marmalade tomorrow, using the same amounts of liquid and chopped yuzu for each. One batch will be boiled in a conventional stockpot, one in the copper preserving pan. I’m curious just how much faster the marmalade cooks up in the preserving pan. I hope it makes a big difference – the faster the excess water boils off, the better the flavor, as lengthy cooking destroys flavor.

All these packages arriving mean lots of empty boxes and packing material, of course, which makes somebody very happy:

Not only does he love chewing on cardboard boxes (all of ours are a bit ragged around the edges 🙂 ), he enjoys playing and pouncing in the paper packing material. The Christmas season is wonderful for cats!

October 23, 2014 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

The opening shot of chocolate season

112 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of cocoa

…and could you ask for a better shot? Here are fifty-one kilograms (about a hundred and twelve pounds) of Valrhona white, milk, and dark chocolates, and another nine kilograms (about twenty pounds) of Valrhona cocoa. No girl could possibly ask for anything more.

This weekend I am starting my flavor trials. Here are the top few flavors on my list:

Kaffir lime, lemongrass, ginger, coconut milk caramels in dark chocolate
pear, sage, and honey fruit jelly, with sage-honey ganache (not sure dark, white, or milk), dipped in chocolate
Chocolate pistachio fudge
Pistachio ganache with kirsch
Pistachio/white chocolate gianduja and dark chocolate ganache
Walnut gianduja with cinnamon milk chocolate ganache

A couple of those flavor combinations come from my FAAAAAABULOUS new chocolate book:

Jean-Pierre Wybauw is one of the foremost experts on chocolatiering, and this is his fourth book. Each of his books is a wonderful combination of theory and practice: it starts by explaining the theory of how everything works and then provides a mouthwatering set of recipes. The first three books in the series plus Peter Greweling’s Chocolates and Confections are my chocolatiering bibles. And now – just in time for chocolate season – a new one!

I haven’t yet had time to devour the book completely, but I did page through the enticing food porn, I mean chocolate recipes, and pull out some interesting flavor combinations. Some of them, like peach fruit jelly and vanilla ganache, are classics that I just hadn’t thought to try yet; others, like raspberry-coriander, sound really intriguing; and others, like caraway-lavender, I can’t visualize at all. Which means I really have to try them!

I have also just finished writing up five pages detailing the things I learned about katazome while studying with John Marshall. I wanted to write down absolutely everything I could remember before I forgot it all – and, while I’m writing it, why not share it with the world? So, with John’s permission, I wrote four pages covering carving stencils, making katazome paste, stenciling the paste, and applying pigments + soy milk. There is also a fifth page that provides links to the first four.

This was no small task – those five pages are over four thousand words, plus photos and video! But I thought it was important to capture what I learned. I’m strongly drawn to katazome, and will likely return to it at some point, integrating it with my weaving somehow.

Here’s a pic of a katazome tiger that John did as a demo during class, and which I rinsed out yesterday – gorgeous!

Meanwhile, the book was on temporary hold while I wrote up the katazome stuff, but I’m back on it now. I’ve written the first seven hundred fifty words of my first prototype chapter, so I’m about a quarter done. Hoping to make more progress in the next several mornings, now that the katazome dissertation is complete!

Finally, we have made a shocking discovery: Fritz has become a hardened criminal! It all started with B.’s socks. They were migrating. We’d come home and find a scattering of socks all over the house. Since B. wasn’t doing it, and I wasn’t doing it, that left only two possibilities. Naturally, Fritz came under suspicion, given his previous history of drug abuse (you may recall that he loves sniffing shoes), but as Tigress also is quite playful, we weren’t quite sure. Until this morning. B. woke up around seven o’clock to the sound of a cat pawing at something. He opened his eyes, and there was Fritz, digging in B.’s clean laundry basket! Eventually Fritz found a sock, and made off with it. Mystery solved!

(But I knew deep down inside that all this shoe-sniffing would lead to a life of crime…we should have sent him off to rehab while there was still time!)

Here are a few photos of the culprit in action. Unfortunately, I was laughing way too hard to take a video…

October 18, 2014 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Japanese textile treasures

Pardon the radio silence since my last post! Sunday and Monday I was at John Marshall’s, Tuesday I spent recovering and doing laundry, and from Wednesday on I’ve been alternately buried in work stuff and book stuff. Both are in exciting phases. At work, my new project is still in the definition phase. Can’t give details, but it’s HUGE – over half the people at Skybox will be working on it over the next year and a half, and it touches literally everything Skybox has been doing up until now. And since I am the project manager for said enormous project, I have been scrambling the last week or two – both to come up to speed myself and to outline the project scope/schedule/roles and responsibilities for everyone else. Fortunately, I have help at all levels, but it’s still a pretty formidable challenge. Which is okay; I like challenges!

In parallel with taming the new-project chaos at work, I’ve been working on reducing the book chaos. I’ve now annotated the transcripts for eleven interviews and imported all the annotations in to Docear (the software I’m using to manage my references). I added tags to each topic, then filtered on those tags to get all the quotes specifically related to my first prototype chapter, which will be about getting started on a project. I put those quotes into my mindmap/outline of the chapter. I plan to write the rough draft of the chapter tomorrow.

I’m also in the process of identifying artists for each chapter. My tentative plan is to feature 1-2 artists in each chapter, sharing their thoughts on the material in the chapter. Some artists’ thoughts fit better in one chapter than another, of course, so I have been working on figuring out the best pairing of artists to chapters. That will also help me identify areas where I need more material, which in turn will shape my interview questions for the next set of interviewees.

In between that, I have two other projects I want to complete this weekend. The first is simple and prosaic – making a batch of soap. B. and I like to make our own soap, mostly because we think it’s better than store-bought soap. I use a blend of coconut and palm oils, and the resulting soap lathers up nicely and doesn’t get soft and mushy. I just bought a bunch of fragrance oils and can’t wait to try them in soap.

The second project is much more ambitious – documenting everything I learned about katazome in three packed days at John Marshall’s studio. John gave us a wealth of information – not just what to do, but why to do it and how to improvise if necessary – and I need to write it all down before I forget it all. And I figure, while I’m at it, I might as well put it up on the website. So (with John’s permission) I’ve been working on a set of pages about katazome, which I’m hoping to publish tomorrow or Monday. Stay tuned!

One of the treats of visiting John’s studio was getting to see some of his textile treasures. Here are some of the photos I took – which, alas, show only a small fraction of the beautiful textiles he showed us!

katazome piece, showing the exquisite detail in the stencil (finger demonstrating scale) — katazome piece, showing the exquisite detail in the hand-carved stencil – this is NOT printed cloth! Instead, paste resist was stenciled on and dye then applied. (Finger in photo to give a sense of scale.)

This is not a block print. It is entirely hand-painted!

Close-up of banner. It looks almost solid gold!

Reverse of banner. There is no gold on this side because you are seeing the back of the paper strips, which were not gold-leafed!

an exquisite piece of embroidery. Th woman's hair is left free at the ends! — an exquisite piece of embroidery. The woman’s hair is left free at the ends!

An outfit worn by Mori Arinori, first Japanese ambassador to the United States

Two pigment-dyed fabrics. The bottom one is nearly new and shows harsh coloring using rust pigments. The top has been washed multiple times, washing away the dark rust areas and leaving a much softer, more appealing look.

A wonderful piece featuring both cut and uncut velvet as well as a variety of weave structures.

A tsujigahana piece - which combines shibori, painted pigments, and dyework. — A tsujigahana piece – a technique which combines shibori, hand-painting, and dyework.

Close-up of tsujigahana piece, showing the delicate detail of the brush strokes.

Close-up of tsujigahana piece. Notice that you can see the stitch holes from the shibori!

And, finally, for those patient enough to read this far, a feline treat: Fritz demonstrating (to Tigress) the proper use of a laundry basket! (And notice how deftly Tigress avoids his surprise attack, leaping gracefully to the cat tree.)