Tien Chiu

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March 14, 2021 by Tien Chiu

Hello again! It’s been awhile!

It’s been almost six months since my last post. I’d say I’ve been in the midst of a tug-o-war between my professional and artistic life, but in fact there really hasn’t been a contest. What irony: I quit my job to pursue a career in weaving, and the immediate result is that I’ve done practically no weaving of my own for the last five years. Everything I’ve done for the last five years, all day, six days out of seven, has been focused either on developing, teaching, or marketing classes about color in weaving, and the seventh day has basically been spent doing laundry and spending time with Jamie.

That sounds kinda grim, but it’s not! I’m loving what I’m doing. This is so much better than working at Google, even though I’m getting paid a lot less, have no job security, and the usual litany of self-employment woes. I love doing research, I love teaching, and I love all the amazing new things I’m learning every day. Not just about weaving, but about running a business, marketing, customer service, hiring and working with contractors, bookkeeping, advertising….the list goes on and on. Every day it’s something new, and I get to pick what I want to work on.

And while it’s still a bit overwhelming, the workload is starting to get less all-consuming. In the beginning I was working 60+ hour weeks for months at a time; now, the load is less, maybe 50-55 hours a week. And this week and next, I’m taking my first absolutely, positively, not-working vacation in nearly five years. It has taken a LOT of work to get to the point where I feel comfortable doing that, but I’m feeling really good about it.

Where does the teaching business stand?

I had (not a typo!) eleven thousand enrollments in my classes last year. I taught a total of four classes (two with Janet Dawson), plus one free prerecorded class, and some people took multiple classes, so I actually taught eight thousand weavers.

Think about that for a moment. Eight thousand weavers.

If I were teaching the traditional way, in physical classes, to groups of five to twenty weavers, I’d have had to teach at least four hundred classes to reach eight thousand weavers. A hundred and fifty more to teach all eleven thousand who enrolled. If I’d taught a packed-to-the-gills three-day workshop every single weekend of the year, it would have taken me eleven years to teach all those classes.

But the beauty of online classes is that – if you design your classes the right way – you can teach a lot of students without compromising the quality of the class. In fact, the classes can actually be better quality with larger groups, because more students lead to livelier discussion groups and more people sharing photos of what they’re working on = more inspiration for other students. It isn’t easy and you have to study how to design classes specifically for online learning, but I believe that – for topics such as mine – a good online class can be greatly superior to the traditional 3-day workshop.

(My students seem to like my classes, anyway; in the post-class survey for Make Your Colors Sing, my “big” class on color in weaving, 86% of the students rated it 9 or 10 out of 10 YES!! when asked if they’d recommend it to other weavers. This makes me very, very happy; I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the class, and I’m glad to know it paid off.)

The other thing that is wonderful to me about the numbers I just quoted is that I taught the vast majority of those students for free. Janet Dawson and I taught the Stash-Busting Scarf Weave-Along (3,000+ students) over three weeks, then pitched students on our longer course Stash Weaving Success. After Stash Weaving Success, we taught the free Discover Color Weave-Along (5,000 students), after which I pitched Make Your Colors Sing.

The Weave-Alongs were intended as “tasters” to give people an idea of what our classes were like, but they were also meant to be stand-alone, free classes that delivered serious value. Many people actually paid $20-25 after the classes to retain lifetime access to course materials because they found them so valuable. Janet and I not only gave away quite a few video and text lessons, we did a month of live lectures and Q&A sessions, and spent considerable time answering questions in the class discussion groups. It was a full-on class and we took it very seriously as a class, even though we weren’t getting paid for it. If I’d enrolled in it, I’d have expected to pay at least $40-50 for it. And we gave it away for free.

It did pay off for us, in that quite a few people signed up for the follow-on class. But I’ve had quite a few people tell me that I should charge for subsequent weave-alongs, because I’m giving away far too much value for free.

I’m not totally ignoring that advice, but I’m not leaping for it either. Because I think one of the most beautiful things about teaching online is that it creates a business model where I can teach eight thousand people a substantial, month-long class about color entirely for free and still make a good living. My parents were scientists, and one of the values they instilled in me was that discovering and spreading knowledge is one of the greatest things you can do. So while I do need to make a living, I also love the idea of being able to gift knowledge for free. So, at least for now – I’ll continue the free weave-alongs.


Enough about the business. I’m writing this blog post because, for the first time in nearly five years, I am actually ON VACATION (and not a working one!) and thus have mental bandwidth to think about other things.

Which of course can lead to only one question: Where are the cats??

Here is Fritz, demonstrating the best way to get adoration (sit on whatever the silly human was paying attention to – then it will have NO CHOICE but to pet you!)

And here’s Her Royal Highness, Tigress herself, in a photo I call “Two Zen Masters” (despite the fact that neither of them is Zen!):

Tigress meets the Dalai Lama?

The poem reads

Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country
is spent developing the mind
instead of the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
but to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
in your heart and in the world
Work for peace
and I say again
Never give up
No matter what is happening
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up.

– His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama

Tomorrow I will be winding two new warps, one to go onto Maryam and one to go onto Grace. I’m actually planning a complete reconfiguration of both looms – the 12 modules currently on Grace are going into Maryam (still threaded – I haven’t TOTALLY lost my mind!), and the four modules currently on Maryam are going into Grace. Plus, I bought four more modules which are going into Grace, for a total of eight modules in Grace and 12 in Maryam.

Of course, that means threading or tying on 2,640 + 1,760 = 4,400 warp threads (plus winding, beaming, etc.). Perhaps I’d better read that poem again!

…And with that, I’m off to other things!

Stay tuned….

Filed Under: Warp & Weave, All blog posts, musings

August 24, 2019 by Tien Chiu

One launch down, and lookee what I found!!

I launched my free mini-course on color in weaving yesterday! It’s about designing handwoven cloth with bold or subtle patterns, and is designed to solve the age-old problem of your beautiful, bright colors weaving into dull, boring mud. If you’re interested in it, go check it out! It’s free, so you’ve got nothing to lose except your fear of another color disaster.

This free mini-course, and the bigger paid course launch that’s coming up right behind it, are the reason you haven’t heard much from me recently. Getting the courses and the marketing campaign behind the launch ready to go has been an insane amount of work – the last three weeks I’ve been working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, getting everything ready and putting on the final coat of polish. Yesterday I announced the course to my mailing list, and promptly fell over exhausted. I am taking today OFF.

And what am I doing with my day off? Why, preparing for the arrival of the lovely Maryam! The garage is PACKED with stuff, and since she arrives in 3.5 weeks, I’ll need to do some decluttering to make space.

Um, just a little bit of decluttering. Here’s where she’s going to live:

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me.

Fortunately, a lot of the work isn’t too hard. Much of the stuff I’ve accumulated is craft stuff where I’ve clearly headed in other directions, so selling or donating it to others who will make better use of it is a fine idea. The table will replace the rickety table in the back yard. The chairs? Haven’t figured that out yet, but I think they can fit next to Maryam on the sides. The elliptical trainer will be replaced by a rowing machine that can be moved around when I need to warp Maryam. So life moves on, and it’s all a matter of logistics and cleaning things up.

Of course, when you clear out the old to make room for the new, interesting finds crop up. I was sorting through a box of ancient memorabilia yesterday and found this!

Tien on the cover of Farang Magazine!

That’s me on the cover of Farang Magazine, back in 2003 when I was backpacking through Southeast Asia. Yep, wearing only body paint. 🙂 Through a series of fabulous adventures, I had convinced the best body painter in Bangkok to paint me – just for the fun of it (and he normally charges $5,000/day!) – and he had arranged a photo shoot with a photographer friend. Then his buddy at Farang Magazine called him up, he was stumped for a cover for the latest issue, did Richard have any suggestions? And next thing I knew, I was gracing the cover of a Thai travel magazine, clad only in body paint. (Well, and a shell necklace, if you want to be technical.)

Ah, those were the days.

But those carefree days of lost youth are behind me now. I’m now beyond such frivolity, bent on more serious things. Like total world domination. It’s seed-saving time!

Here are a few of the steps in my seed-saving process.

First, I gather tomatoes from my adorable killer mutant ninja tomatoes. I taste-test them, write my (terse) notes on a slip of paper, and photograph the fruits next to a quarter (for scale) along with the plant number. That will all go into my tomato database.

As you can see, I’m getting yellow Fruity Mix tomatoes this year. This is an excellent thing – last year’s were all red, and I was worried that the yellow genes had all gotten lost. But this year I got orange and yellow as well as red – so am selecting all of the above!

Next step is to squeeze out the fruit gel into labeled cups, and let the gel ferment for a couple days so the gel around the seeds rots away. (The gel contains a germination inhibitor, and also can carry diseases.) After a few days, this cup looks delightfully ripe and rotted:

Next you rinse out the seeds (they sink to the bottom, the gunky stuff pours off the top), dry them on an uncoated paper plate, and put them in a neatly labeled paper envelope. Voila! Freshly saved killer mutant ninja tomato seeds, ready to wreak havoc on another unsuspecting generation.

Of course, the next task is to enter all the information into the database. That’s what I’m not looking forward to. Perhaps later today….

Anyway, I have not been silent because life has been slow. Quite the reverse: it has been PACKED!! Hopefully things should slow down a bit soon, so I won’t be quite so exhausted all the time, and will have other things to show you.

Filed Under: garden, Warp & Weave, All blog posts Tagged With: tomatoes

March 9, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Science, hypothesis testing, and painted warp samples

I’m teaching two classes in June, at ANWG – a workshop on color mixing and a seminar on how to choose colors and weave structures for painted warps. (You can register for either of them here. Friday’s morning’s talk on painted warps is already full, but last I heard there were still spaces in the workshop and in the afternoon seminar.)

Since I’ve been too foggy-headed to do much work on Color Study #5 for the workshop, and I need to create some more examples for the painted warp seminar, I’ve been brainstorming painted warp samples instead.

I already have one set of samples, which Laura Fry wove for me, and which are winging their way to me as I write. They are woven on a warp that I had previously dyed in rainbow colors, in a variety of structures and with carefully chosen weft colors, and are lovely:

first set of painted warp samples, woven by Laura Fry
first set of painted warp samples

However, since I didn’t plan out the warp colors in advance, they don’t fully demonstrate the principles that I want to illustrate. So a second set of samples will be needed.

There are two approaches to sampling. The first is the exhaustive, information-gathering approach. This is where you have no hypothesis and are trying to develop one by gathering data, so you try every possible combination and then develop a theory to fit the data. (Cue 1,500 dye samples.) This is incredibly labor-intensive, but sometimes it’s got to be done.

I had originally planned to take this approach to painted warp sampling, because I didn’t have a solid theoretical basis for color. I thought up all the color and weave structure combinations that I thought would be useful to try, and came up with about 1,500 of them. Clearly this was not going to fly.

Fortunately, after another year and a half of study, plus teaching the first half of the Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course (it’s amazing how much more you learn through teaching), I now have a solid understanding of how color works in weaving. Very solid. I won’t claim to understand everything about color (nobody ever understands everything about anything), but at this point I think I understand enough about color in weaving to solve almost all the common color problems in weaving, or explain why the problem isn’t resolvable. (As in physics, no matter how much you know, you still can’t do the impossible.)

Since I now know more, I can take the other approach to sampling, which is testing a hypothesis. This is where you say “I think X will happen if I do Y, and will do a sample to see if this is true.”

So now I’m formulating samples to demonstrate known principles, rather than doing samples in order to figure out the principles.

Suddenly, I’ve gone from 1,500 samples to 44. Whew!!

Here are some of the principles I’m planning to demonstrate:

  • Warps with a wide range of values (i.e., that contain light, medium, and dark values) will make pattern appear/disappear in areas, no matter what weft is chosen.
  • Warps with a narrower range of values (i.e. all light, all medium, all dark, or combinations of any two) can be made to have bold or subtle pattern depending on choice of weft colors and weave structure.
  • Warps made with colors that fall between two primaries (primaries here are cyan (turquoise), magenta, and yellow) will allow you to choose a weft that preserves the bright colors while blending with everything else – warps that don’t, will blend into duller colors if woven in a structure that blends colors.
  • If your colors blend into dull colors, choosing a weave structure that separates warp and weft colors as much as possible (by creating warp dominant and weft dominant areas but not 50-50 mixes) will allow you to preserve the bright colors in your painted warp.
  • To show off painted warps, use a weft that is the same darkness or darker – a lighter weft will tend to draw attention to itself, pushing the painted warp into the background.

The ANWG seminar will likely form the nucleus for an online course about weaving with painted warps. It probably won’t be released for awhile yet, though – I’m planning to revamp my Color Courage for Weavers online course offerings and the painted warp course will definitely have to wait until after that work is done.

I’ve chosen the colors for the samples and am currently debating drafts. The simplest choice would be a plain twill plus twill blocks, which would probably resonate with students who prefer simpler structures. The twill would demonstrate what happens when you pick a structure that blends colors, and the twill blocks would demonstrate what happens when you mix colors. Simple and neat.

However, I’ve woven miles of twill and twill blocks for my other samples, and I’m desperately bored of both structures. I also want to demonstrate that you can weave sexier structures than those. So I’m thinking of using these two drafts, which I was using to demonstrate optical mixing and simultaneous contrast in my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course a few weeks ago.

Here’s the first draft, from Handweaving.net (contributed by an anonymous visitor). It demonstrates what happens when you blend colors:

Handweaving.net draft #45549, contributed by an anonymous visitor

And here is the same draft with a different tie-up, demonstrating keeping colors separate:

The same draft, but with a bolder twill tie-up

Kathy Fennell (one of the course participants) wove up both drafts, and they look quite nice in real life. They need very different setts, of course, but they look good enough that I think they would work to demonstrate the principles. And it’s a nice touch that they are the same design, except that one is subtle and the other bold.

The only thing I worry about is that they will look too complex and will intimidate some students. And 44 samples in that one weave structure is a LOT! Perhaps I will rethread to something different, halfway through.

Meanwhile, the cold is starting to improve, so I’ll be back at work on Color Study 5 for Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop later today.

Color Study 5 is about visual complexity/busy-ness, which is basically how much effort it takes for the brain to take in/process a piece. It’s a juicy topic, and I’m starting with an explanation of how the brain processes an image – any image. Which, in turn, starts with some observations about what our visual system evolved to do. It’s really cool stuff.

For example, our eyes are irresistibly attracted to areas of high contrast, particularly light/dark contrast. Our eyes go to areas of high contrast first, and as designers we need to be aware of that/take advantage of that in when designing, to focus the eye where we want it. But why is that? It’s because the eye is physically built for edge detection, finding and signaling edges before data even goes to the brain. The stronger the contrast, the louder the signal. That’s because early detection of edges helps the brain distinguish pattern from ground (objects from background) faster. And that, in turn, enables us to detect food and predators faster and more efficiently.

There are other factors related to our evolution that affect how we view an object, and how the brain processes what we see. That, in turn, influences how we need to design.

Do my students need to know all that information about human evolution before they can design effectively? Technically, no. I could just list off the important factors and tell them to design using those factors. But I believe that giving them the why is important, because it enables them to do more than memorize – it enables them to think for themselves, to reason about other factors that I may not be giving them. For example, if they encounter a diagonal line, they might say, “Aha! And how would the primitive brain react to diagonal lines in nature? What diagonal lines might it encounter?” and get insight from that.

When I was sixteen, I went to a summer program that taught the process of mathematics – not just facts, but the intellectual explorations involved in doing mathematical research. The motto of the program was “Think deeply of simple things.”

And that’s how I approach teaching – not just what, but also why.

Filed Under: Warp & Weave, All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: painted warp

March 3, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Relearning laziness

I passed a huge milestone today! I took a day entirely off. (Well, almost entirely. I did answer one urgent email from a student who couldn’t access the course. But that was it.) I’ve spent the day puttering about, going for a nice lazy brunch with Mike, reorganizing my giant tubs full of machine embroidery thread, tending my tomato seedlings, planning out my velvet sample warp, and threading Amazing Grace. What I haven’t been doing is planning out my next week’s work, answering work emails, worrying about what deadline is coming up next, or hovering over my blog/email statistics.

This is the first real day off I’ve had in over two years. Maybe three. Pretty much every single day, the first two hours of the day have been devoted to business stuff, even on days when I wasn’t officially supposed to be working. There was such an overwhelming load of work that urgently needed to be done – especially the last two months, while I’ve been teaching/writing lessons and lectures for my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop class – that I just couldn’t relax and let it go on weekends.

But I’ve now reached the point where the workload is not quite so insane, either for the class or for the business. In the class, we’ve gotten over the “explaining how color works” hump and are now into the part about how to design with color. As a result, the lessons are more conceptual (less diagram-heavy) and the students are learning more independently. So I am doing less teaching and corrections and more enthusiastic cheering, offering refinements, and words of encouragement as they start flying on their own. This is the most fun part of the class, for me and (I think) for them!

So this week has been a fairly laid-back week. Even on the business side, I decided to take some time to play. I needed some prettier pictures for marketing purposes. Most of my sample photos look like this:

Which is great if you’re trying to demonstrate color principles, but for marketing purposes? Pretty grim, babe.

So I got a bunch of samples together and started playing with them on a lunch break. Here’s one of the pretty pictures that resulted:

And for my latest Warp & Weave blog post, I created a fan out of one of the color gamps that Laura Fry wove for me. I’m very fond of this one:

a color gamp, spread out to look like a rainbow fan

It’s nice to get to do something fun for a change!

Meanwhile, in tomato-land, the seedlings were looking distressingly purple last week:

picture of purple tomato seedlings

I initially thought “Oh, no problem, they’ve got the Anthy (anthocyanin) gene, that makes tomatoes have purple stems.” Then I remembered that Fruity Mix doesn’t have the Anthy gene. Oops.

A quick Google search turned up the answer: phosphorous deficiency, often brought on by too-cold growing conditions. Well, the tomato seedlings were being kept warm by heating pads – though it had been extremely cold by California standards (down to the mid-to-high thirties at night, scandalous!), the temperature had stayed in the 60’s in their little incubation area. So I didn’t think the temps were the problem. I mixed liquid bone meal with some water and put it into the next watering. While not yet fully recovered, they are looking much better already!

tomato seedlings recovering from a phosphorus deficiency

The interesting part is that they are greening from the center out. Here’s a top view of one of the seedlings:

tomato seedling, purple on the outer edges and green in the center

This looks weird but makes sense when you think about it: the phosphorus comes up from the central stem, and gets grabbed by the nearest cells as it makes its way up the stem. I’m looking forward to seeing them turn completely green. It’s hard going around with a purple thumb!

Nothing much on the velvet front, except a small amount of progress threading Amazing Grace. Maybe an inch’s worth of progress. Still, an inch is an inch, and there are only about 16 inches’ worth to go. Ricki is coming over on Friday and hopefully will get a bunch more threading done. It “only” takes about an hour for me to thread an inch’s worth of heddles, so in theory there is only about 16 hours’ work left to get her threaded.

Of course, then the next step (after sleying and tying on) is debugging, which is almost as tedious. Oy. Well, you only have to do it once.

My approach to these sorts of tasks is much the same as my approach was to large cross-stitch projects, back in college. They are much more manageable once you accept, like Sisyphus, that you are doomed to roll the boulder uphill forever. Then you can simply lose yourself in the process of doing this tedious task, put on an audiobook or a podcast, and be pleasantly surprised 400 hours later to discover that (unlike Sisyphus) you are actually done AND you have a finished piece!

Speaking of threading, I believe I’ll run off and do some more of it now. But I will leave you with this photo to console you. A few days ago, I was photographing my “Tiger Eye Shawl,” my very first attempt at designing my own draft (it’s an adaptation of the “Heart Throb Scarf” in the Twill Thrills Best of Weaver’s book). Or more accurately, I was attempting to photograph it, because of course the moment I laid it down on the bed, the inevitable happened.

“What’s this?” said Tigress.

“My Tiger Eye Shawl,” I replied. “I need to take photos of it for the talk I’m giving tomorrow.”

“But there’s only one tiger in this house worth taking photos of,” she replied, “so it’s a good thing I stopped by.” And curled up for a nice long nap.

Of course, she was right. The cat is always right.

My cat Tigress on my Tiger Eye Shawl
Tigress on my Tiger Eye Shawl

Filed Under: garden, Warp & Weave, All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: tomatoes

February 23, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Visioning

Like many other entrepreneurs, I belong to a “mastermind” – a small group of small-business-launchers who support each other. While I’ve never met any of the other three women in my mastermind in person (we live in three different countries!), we’ve become great friends and we chat a lot in our little Facebook group. We help each other solve our problems, hold each other accountable for our commitments, and laugh a lot along the way.

One of them asked if we’d done a vision board recently – a deep dive, looking out 10-20 years. What do you want your life to look like? Where do you want to live? How much time until you want to stop working? What income model will get you there? And then think how to match the income model with a business that will get you there.

(Can you tell that what she teaches is financial planning?)

I have to admit that I was a bit taken aback. Mostly because I hadn’t thought anywhere near that far in advance when I got started down this teaching path.

I thought about it for awhile, then wrote:

The vision board is a really interesting and really good idea! I didn’t think that far ahead at all – I just thought, “What could I do that might make enough to pay the bills, that doesn’t involve working in high tech or some other job I would hate?” and teaching weaving online was the only thing that came up.

However, I’m happy with my choice, because frankly I love teaching this stuff – so much that I don’t really see retiring, because I’d do this for free! (Maybe not as much, but yes, I would teach for the fun of it. I love connecting to students, and seeing understanding light up in their eyes!)

But yes, I should do a visioning board…


Speaking of teaching, I’m now six weeks into teaching my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course. This is the twelve-week, instructor-led online workshop course I was selling in December. It’s been a grueling pace for me – I started with a solid course outline, but have made some major revisions, and added a LOT more material, in the process of teaching the course.

I’ve been delighted with my students – they’ve been thirstily soaking up everything I’ve been showing them. And so far, they seem to be delighted with the course. Many of them have said that this was exactly the course they had been searching for but not been able to find, and that they feel they finally “get” color now!

Which is, of course, exactly why I created the course, and why I love teaching!

I have six more weeks of the course to go, but more importantly I have two more modules of the course to create. Each module is 3-7 lessons plus 3-4 student exercises – so between creating the lessons and returning feedback on the exercises, I’ve had very little time to do anything else! That’s one of the reasons there have been very few blog posts lately.

But in another four weeks, I will be done writing lessons…and then watch out world! I am dreaming of velvets again….

So about those visioning boards: I probably should do one, but I’m not sure I need to. This is my vision of the perfect life.

Almost as perfect as a cat’s life. Here’s Fritz, getting a belly rub.

Fritz, getting a belly rub
Fritz, getting a belly rub

Filed Under: Warp & Weave, All blog posts, musings

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