Tien Chiu

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Bridal Couture

All work and no play was making Tien verrrry cranky, so when Bridal Couture by Susan Khalje arrived in my mailbox yesterday, I was thrilled at having an excuse to get away from the computer.  It’s a wonderful book, with detailed instructions on how to construct the exterior and interior of a wedding-gown.  So far I’ve just drooled over the photo gallery and read through the section on applying lace (useless to me since I am not covering my handwoven fabric with machine-made lace!!), but I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

Looking at those amazing dresses is almost making me wish I had chosen a more complicated pattern! but, I like the simplicity and elegance of the pattern I chose, and as I’m not planning an ultra-formal cathedral wedding, perhaps it’s better to stay away from the more ornate styles.  It would look kind of silly to get married outdoors, surrounded by wilderness, in a pearl-encrusted, sequinned, bazillion layers of tulle, etc. dress.

Weavolution is cranking along, and I’m almost starting to get blase about our popularity.  Another day, another 20,000 hits, ho-hum (!).  (Actually yesterday we “only” had 19,412.)  At the moment, measured by number of hits, we’re ALREADY the top weaving site on the WWW! unless Handweaving.net or Weavezine has gained massively in number of hits in the last few months.  I am pleased, very pleased.  I just hope we can keep up our numbers.

Back to the dress.  I have gotten very little woven in the last week, as you may imagine – have been working 16 hour days between work and Weavolution.  But I think that is tapering off (thank goodness!) so I have high hopes for the weekend.  I plan to take some time off, relax, go for a bike ride, and all the other things I haven’t had time for this week or last.  Then I plan to go back to weaving.

So I don’t get too bored while weaving 20 yards of very fine fabric over the course of 2 months, I’ll probably start  sewing up muslins for the dress and the coat.  Sometime in the next week or two, I imagine…

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Wow. Wow. WOW!

Weavolution  stats:

Day One:

  • 38, 486 page views (!!!!)
  • 2,183 visits
  • 1,464 unique visitors
  • 600+ registered users

Day Two:

  • 32, 543 page views (!!!)
  • 2,144 visits
  • 1, 423 unique visitors
  • 1,100+ registered users

Day Two morning: I get a phone call from our hosting service suggesting that we might want to upgrade our hosting plan, given the massive increase in traffic.  LOL!

We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from people who love the site, and the forums are already pretty well populated.  People are creating a lot of groups, too – Laura Fry’s efficiency group already has 168 members!

So I am thrilled.  It’s been a long and laborious 9 months, but this site has really taken off.  Unbelievable.

Needless to say, no time for weaving in the last few days – it’s all I can do to keep up with bug reports (fortunately relatively few, and most of which we knew about beforehand), feature requests, and lost passwords/bounced signup emails.  Hopefully it should calm down in a few days and then I can get back to weaving again.

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What an amazing, AMAZING day.

In just 12 hours – not even a full day! – after launch, Weavolution has racked up:

  • 29,871 (!!!) page views in 1,903 visits
  • 1,302 unique visitors
  • 600+ new registered users

I think that says it all.

I got up at 3am this morning to work on the launch, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go collapse now…

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Weavolution is LIVE!!!

JOIN THE WEAVOLUTION

The new online gathering place for hand weavers

Weavolution.com, an online social network designed to meet the unique needs of handweavers, launched its beta test on June 8, 2009. Designed to bring handweavers together from around the world, Weavolution.com is a one-stop resource for every type of handweaver.

From hobby to production, from peg to dobby, Weavolution provides a place for weavers to meet, discuss and participate in moderated user groups and forums.

Members may post projects, looms, yarns, books, and accessories to share with others and solicit feedback from other members.

But you don’t have to be a member or even a weaver to explore the site and learn about weaving free of charge.

Weavolution aims to become an inclusive, global community that encourages weavers by enabling them to discover and follow trends in weaving; find local, national and international resources; and find businesses catering to their needs. Weavolution members can search the site’s databases to view items, group postings and research information catalogued by others.

Weavolution’s goal is to provide a website for handweavers that is useful, fun and helpful, and to be a resource for shops, products and ideas from around the corner and around the world.

The project began in 2008 when three weavers from across the United States, Claudia Segal, Tien Chiu, and Alison Giachetti, met online and formed Weavolution. Working together with a host of dedicated volunteers, the team forged Weavolution.com into a website with the potential to become a community.

Come, take a look. Weavolution.com is available for anyone to explore. You don’t have to sign up to see our site. But if you do, we hope you’ll decide to

JOIN THE WEAVOLUTION

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First yard down

I’ve now woven the first yard of the fabric.  It’s interesting – I had thought white on white would be very forgiving, since it’s all one color, but it turns out it’s extremely unforgiving, because there are no colors to distract from flaws in the pattern.  Tension problems show up like a sore thumb if I advance too far, and if I break a thread and don’t  find it in time, the broken warp thread shows up as a horizontal lump in the fabric.  I wove one of my hairs into the fabric by accident, and promptly had a thin black line across the fabric.  I spent the next ten minutes laboriously picking it out – no small deal given the fineness  of the fabric, the hair breaking every inch or so, and the fact that my hair is extremely long.  Next time I shave my head before starting!!

Rosie asked how I could cut off the fabric while weaving without creating tension problems.  This is part of the magic of having an AVL loom!  The breast beam (sometimes called the sticky or sandpaper beam) is covered with sandpaper, and holds tension.  The fabric doesn’t slip on the beam because the sandpaper is rough and holds it.  This allows the cloth to have two different tensions, one on the breast beam and one on the cloth beam, meaning you don’t get distortions  from knots etc. in the finished fabric – you can wind it loosely onto the beam, rather than having to wind it at weaving tension.

What this means is that, on an AVL, you can simply unwind the fabric from the cloth beam, cut off part of it, roll the remaining fabric around the cloth beam again, tension it very lightly, and start weaving again.  The sandpaper beam holds the tension unchanged while you’re messing around.

Handy, that.

Weavolution is entering its final pre-launch phases…the alpha site has been shut down, and the database is being transferred to our final home at weavolution.com.  We go live at 9am Monday morning (Pacific time)!

Super excited, but also super frazzled.  I’ve been working double and triple time getting this site ready for launch, and I’m so close to it now that it’s impossible for me to judge it fairly.  We have a lot of bugs (some of them fairly major) and I’m hoping people won’t be put off by this…we’ve had a lot of positive feedback from the alpha testers on the overall functionality, but I don’t know how the rest of the weaving world will react… so I am really nervous and really excited about this.  I hope it goes well!