Fiber Arts | Tien Chiu's Blog

May 26, 2025 by Tien Chiu 15 Comments

Rebooting

It’s been a long time since I posted much, but I’ve decided to restart my blog. It’s been my creative journal over the years, and I only stopped because for a long time, my creative energies were sucked completely into other things.

However, as the Handweaving Academy’s matured, I’m finding that I now have a bit more creative energy for my own projects. So I’m rebooting my blog.

The blog isn’t the only thing that’s rebooting, however. My life goes through periodic Phoenix cycles, where the old life burns away and a new one begins. The last one started when I pivoted away from high-tech to start my own business teaching weaving. I had to change a lot of things about my identity, and rethink what was important to me.

This last month has started another phoenix cycle. This time, it’s because my wife and I are separating. This isn’t a bad thing. We still love each other, but we’ve reached the point where we need to grow in different directions. Sometimes love means knowing when to let go, and this is one of those times. Neither of us is sure where we’re going to move yet. She is thinking Seattle. I have no idea where I’m going to settle yet. My current plan is to move to Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, for three to six months and then decide whether I want to settle in Mexico, or go back to the U.S.

Both of us are looking eagerly forward to our new lives. We are also committed to supporting each other through the transition and staying good friends afterwards. We don’t see this as an end to the relationship, just a transmutation. I know that sounds odd, considering that most divorces are at least somewhat acrimonious, but we still love each other a great deal. We just feel that this is the right time to stop living together, merging finances, and so forth.

(For the last five years, we’ve asked each other every few months whether we’re still right for each other. I think that’s a good question for all couples to ask – it helps keep the relationship healthy. This time, it became clear that we needed to evolve in different directions, and that we couldn’t do that within the bounds of our current relationship.)

As supportive as we are of each other, though, this is a huge change. We have been together for nearly 20 years, and will celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary together on June 12 before we go our separate ways. So I need to reinvent myself as a single person.

When this kind of big change happens, I like to go somewhere else for a while – someplace unfamiliar, that shakes me loose from my old moorings and assumptions. In this case, it’s Mexico. I visited Mexico City recently, and loved it, but decided not to move there because (don’t laugh) there are only two powerlifting gyms in the city and both are prohibitively far away from the places I’d prefer to live. San Miguel de Allende is less expensive and has a large English-speaking population (which will make the transition easier). It may have a powerlifting-appropriate gym, but if it doesn’t, it’s inexpensive enough that I can rent a house and set up a home gym in the back yard.

During the bottom of a phoenix cycle, I also like to do a contemplative, slow project. The last two times, I spun and knit a “ring shawl” – one fine enough to be drawn through a wedding ring – using a drop spindle and spinning while walking, waiting in train stations, and in all the other “in between” times.

Here’s the “Spiral of Life” shawl that came out of my last metamorphosis:

It has eight arms, and eight motifs in each arm, reflecting the themes of earth, air, fire, water, light, darkness, right action, and love. These reflect the important things in life: balance between the Four Elements, between joy and sorrow, taking action/doing the right thing, and love of life/compassion for all things.

This time round, I’m a weaver, not a knitter. So I’m working on a handspun, jacquard-woven scarf, instead.

Here’s the design (so far). This image shows the scarf as it will be woven:

And this image shows the scarf as it will be worn (draped around the neck):

I’m handspinning the yarn for it on a top-whorl spindle, on my morning walks and anywhere else I have time. I’ve even been doing some spinning in the gym between powerlifting sets!

Here are pictures of the silk fiber that I’ll be spinning. The first one shows the phoenix yarn, which I hand-dyed myself from silk brick. Each little braid is about one ounce of fiber, and I’ll need two of them to weave the scarf. (The other two are backup. I’m a belt-and-suspenders kinda gal.)

And here is the blue silk I’ll be spinning. I did not dye this myself; it’s from Fiberartemis on Etsy. I have been admiring her wonderful dye work for ages, and now I get to spin some of it myself!

So far the yarn is coming out at 7600 yards per pound (it might be a little less considering shrinkage after washing). That’s a bit under half the size of a fine laceweight knitting yarn, or about 1.5x the weight of sewing thread. So it is quite fine, especially for yarn spun on a drop spindle.

Here are pictures of some skeins I spun earlier, about 450 yards. They’re from a different color gradient, but the yarn size should be good for sampling.

I’m pleased with it – it is pretty darn consistent, especially considering that I haven’t spun anything at all for over 20 years.

I’ll be weaving it as singles using a double twill structure – the blue and gold sample at the top of this photo. (The bottom sample, in purple and yellow, is taquete – I really didn’t like that much.)

So far the plan is to weave it on a dark blue warp in 10/2 cotton, sett at 24 ends per inch. 10/2 cotton is on the larger side for that weft – normally you would choose a warp about half the weight – but it’s what I have on the loom, and as you can see, it works. There is a small chance I’ll put a finer warp on instead, but given that I’m moving in a few months and the project HAS to be done by then, I think it’s probably better to go with what I have.

I’ll need to spin about 1800 yards of yarn for the scarf, and I spin about 50 yards a day on my morning walks, so this will take at least a month to spin. Spindle spinning is not nearly as fast as spinning on a wheel, but since part of the point is to be meditative and slow, with plenty of time for reflection, that’s perfectly fine with me.

That’s it for today! Look for more posts as the project – and the move – progress.

April 9, 2013 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Reborn in Fire: Phoenix Rising

I conceived this piece as part of a series about phoenixes – life, death, and rebirth. I have bipolar disorder, and without medication, my moods cycle between “flying high” – hypomania – and the darkness of depression. This cycle of mood swings has almost killed me twice (read my essay on living with bipolar disorder if you want more details), and I wanted to create a piece that celebrated my breaking free of the cycle ten years ago, when I was finally diagnosed and treated correctly. The phoenix seemed the perfect symbol for this – a bird that dies in flame and is resurrected from its own ashes.

At the outset, I had a theme but no idea what the piece would be – a garment? a wall hanging? a sculpture? I made mood boards, mind maps, and lots of sketches, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them – no matter what I tried, no one design captured the ideas I was striving for. It wasn’t until I realized that I didn’t have to capture all the ideas in a single design, but could work in series, producing multiple works with the same theme, that I felt comfortable moving into a single design.

I started by weaving samples – eleven yards of samples! – in very fine threads. I used a turned summer and winter structure with a 120/2 silk ground warp and a 60/2 silk pattern warp. (For the uninitiated, 60/2 silk is slightly finer than sewing thread, and 120/2 silk is about one-third the size of sewing thread. So these were very fine threads indeed!) I painted the warp in different colors and dyed different colors of weft so I could try many combinations. Eventually I settled on two colorways: one in fiery colors, and one with a brightly colored pattern warp and solid black ground warp/weft.

I wove many samples and eventually decided to use two structures: the turned summer and winter I started with, and a mix of double weave and twill (the black phoenixes). I felt that the black phoenixes on the smoky orange background conveyed the idea of “death” nicely, and the fiery-colored phoenixes conveyed the joy of life, but I was puzzling over how to combine them.

What finally saved me was a show deadline! I had planned to enter the Pikes Peak Weavers Guild show Woven Together: Firestorm, commemorating the 2012 Colorado wildfires (some of the worst ever), and was rapidly running out of time to put together an entry. I wanted something to be spot-on for the theme, and eventually it dawned on me that their show was about fire – so why not use flames? I hastily put together a template, and after much rearranging, had the composition I wanted. The two flames on the fiery background show the cycle of death and rebirth – from living phoenixes to dead and desolate phoenixes to vibrant life again.

Many thanks to Thrasher’s Framing for mounting the piece and to Joe Decker for the excellent photography!

April 9, 2013 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

The Celtic Braid Cape

The initial inspiration for my Celtic Braid Cape arrived in 2009, when I was working from home in an unheated garage. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it never gets freezing, but winter is still pretty nippy! I was wrapping my fingers around a mug of tea to warm them up when I thought how wonderful it would be to have a coat to wear in the garage, to keep me warm as I typed.

And thus the idea for the project was born.

I have a long-time fascination with Celtic knotwork, and had prepared drafts for many different types of Celtic knotwork. Most of them didn’t work out well in practice – the knot designs tended to collapse when the fabric was wet-finished – but after much experimenting, I drafted a three-strand braid pattern that worked beautifully, in samples as well as on paper.

On to creating the fabric!

I happened to have on hand some silk yarn, six strands of 60/2 silk loosely twisted together, and some fine cashmere/mohair yarn that I didn’t know what to do with. However, there wasn’t quite enough of either to weave the fabric for the coat. So I added some fine wool yarn and some additional bits of silk yarn that I had lying around, to make up the amount I needed. I dyed the silk a beautiful garnet red, and the cashmere/mohair/wool mix a deep black.

Because I was cramming the dyepot (always a bad idea), one of the silk skeins came out darker than the others. I solved this problem by alternating stripes of the darker color with stripes of the lighter ones, so the resulting fabric has every third stripe darker than the others. I actually like this “design feature”; it adds interest to the fabric without being obtrusive.

I wove the fabric in record time (for me anyway!) – about two weeks for fourteen yards of fabric. Now I had to work out how to sew it up. I liked this Photoshop simulation:

However, I knew I’d need to do considerable work to get it right, especially since I knew nothing about couture sewing. So I labored over many muslins, and over a version in mohair I was using to practice couture techniques. This took several months.

Then, of course, I got engaged! and spent over a year weaving and sewing my wedding dress. By the time I finished, the impetus for the project was lost, and the fabric languished in my stash for several years.

Then Handwoven announced a contest for sleeveless garments, and I spotted a Vogue pattern that would be perfect for both fabric and contest – a cape over a simple vest. I knew instantly that this was the design I wanted to use.

Unfortunately, I was still finishing up my Autumn Splendor project, so I wasn’t able to meet the contest deadline – but the idea was sound, so I moved rapidly ahead with the cape, sewing it up quickly and with a minimum of drama. I was ecstatic when Handwoven published it in their January/February 2013 issue!

Here are some photos from the making of the project:

Left, the draft for the project: right, the three-strand Celtic braid draft used in the project.

A close-up of the pattern as it is being woven.

The fabric before and after wet finishing. (Wet-finished, top; unfinished web, bottom.) Notice how the lines soften and change to become more smoothly curvy!

The wet-finished fabric.

The muslin for the first coat concept.

A (crude) Photoshop simulation of the coat.

September 7, 2011 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Autumn Splendor

This project evolved profoundly over the eight months I worked on it. The garment design took its original inspiration from a TV space alien’s robes, then changed to a long, straight-cut jacket, and finally to a swing coat with dramatic curves. The handwoven fabric started with dÃ©vorÃ© – autumn colored “leaves” floating on a gold mesh – and evolved through several iterations to finish with a maple leaf pattern with dyed weft and cross-dyed fabric.

Here is the original jacket inspiration, Delenn’s costume on the TV show Babylon 5:

I loved the flowing “feel” of the garment, which is captured in Autumn Splendor, though the lines are profoundly different.

In an early blog post on Autumn Splendor, I wrote,

I want to do more work with the “Autumn Splendor” theme ““ developing the concept into something more concrete, something I can actually embody. Right now I have a vision of falling maple leaves, glimpses of gold glitter, and brocade over flowing silk. I have to figure out how to transform that into something I can actually make.

One of the ideas I have been playing with is the transient nature of autumn. As a child, I was fascinated by the leaf bookmarks that my parents would bring home from Taiwan ““ leaves treated with acid to burn away the soft parts, leaving only the spidery, skeletal veins. It reminded me a little of the decorations people put up around Halloween ““ except this was a skeleton leaf, not a skeleton person. Same thing: beauty in transience, delicacy in death’s remnants.

So I really liked the idea of “ghost leaves”, skeletal remnants of a woven design suggesting a leaf.

Skeletal remnants of a woven design, of course, leads directly to devorÃ©, a technique in which the cellulose components of a fabric are “burned out”, usually with sodium bisulfate, leaving only the protein/synthetic components.

Next I wove some beautiful samples in dÃ©vorÃ©, weaving tencel yarn with gold embroidery thread, then burning away the tencel to create a falling-leaf motif, with the tencel “leaves” floating on gold mesh. Here are two photos from that conceptual stage:

Autumn Splendor, fifth in a series of samples, background layer only

autumn splendor - fifth sample, background with devore overlay — Autumn Splendor - fifth sample, background with devore overlay

I felt that the devore, while beautiful, simply distracted from the sweep of autumn colors – and was really too delicate for the outer surface of a garment.

I wasn’t sure what to do next, and inspiration was not forthcoming, so I set the project aside for a month or two. It resurrected itself when I looked at a coat pattern I was developing:

I realized almost immediately that this was the design I had been looking for. I hastily designed a new fabric, a pattern of maple leaves:

and wove up a sample, which I loved:

maple leaf pattern, in handwoven fabric (bottom sample)

The clothing pattern changed dramatically through the course of eleven (!) muslins, getting a more dramatic collar, swooping curves, and finally losing the collar completely. Here is the eleventh and final muslin:

Next I designed and wove the fabric, which is quite complex. The warp is white 60/2 silk, approximately the size of sewing thread (15,000 yards per pound). The weft is 2/60 nm wool, which started out white. I knitted the weft into ten “knitted blanks” (rectangles of plain knitted fabric) using a knitting machine, then dyed the blanks in two colorways, each with seventeen colors shading gradually between gold and purple-brown on one side, and deep red to purple-brown on the other side. After dyeing, I unraveled the weft and wove ten four-foot panels:

I then overdyed the panel with fiber-reactive dyes, which would dye the silk warp but not the wool weft. This gave color to the leaves, while keeping them distinct from the background.

Sewing-wise, this was my first experience with drafting a pattern “from scratch”. I worked with Sharon Bell, my sewing mentor, to create the pattern, drafting it in Adobe Illustrator and printing it out on a large-format printer. Here is one of the patterns I drafted:

After I finally had the design and all ten panels complete, I completed the design by creating embroidered leaves on the front, stitching together three layers of silk and embroidering on the veins, then overcasting the edges. Each leaf took about two hours!

The entire eight-month voyage of discovery on this project can be read here. Enjoy!

May 6, 2011 by Tien Chiu 7 Comments

Kodachrome Jacket

Kodachrome was my response to the Handwoven Garment Challenge in 2011. Ten garments, five loom-shaped and five tailored, would be selected to appear in the Vav Fashion show in Sweden, and would be published in Handwoven. I decided it would be fun to enter, and Kodachrome was born.

Kodachrome, photographed by Joe Decker I considered my design carefully. At Convergence 2010, I had noticed that the best runway garments were the dramatic ones, with lots of color ““ delicate, beautiful, subtle patterns simply vanished from forty feet away. I wanted Kodachrome to play well on the runway, but I also wanted it to reward the close-up viewer. So I knew I wanted a colorful project, with bold colors, but also with an interesting woven pattern to reward the up-close viewer. There were other design considerations. Because (if it won) it would be published in Handwoven, I had to make it suitable for a Handwoven article. This meant weaving something on eight shafts or less (as opposed to my customary 24), using commercially available yarn, a commercial pattern, and using techniques simple enough to explain in three magazine pages or less. It also had to be designed, woven, and sewn in just two and a half months, since the contest began in mid-January and finished up on April 1. Given the timeframe, I didn’t have a lot of time to experiment or design. I decided to use a painted warp, as this could be done quickly with yarns I had in my stash, and to use 30/2 silk, because I had gobs of it on hand. But I didn’t want to do a warp painted in a single bout ““ the scarves I’d seen that were wound in just one bout looked boring and predictable, and I wanted this piece to be jazzy and exciting. So I decided to use stripes, each warp-painted in the same colors, but offset from each other so the colors wouldn’t “pool”. Now I needed a pattern to go with the stripes of color. I didn’t have much experience with 8-shaft designs, so I flipped through Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of Eight-Shaft Patterns until I found design #173, an advancing point twill. I liked the overall look, but it didn’t quite suit my needs, so I made significant alterations to it, changing the look and the size of the pattern to suit the width of my stripes. Since painted warps were unfamiliar ground, I decided to sample. I painted six bouts for a 12″³ wide sample, testing different color spacings as well as different amounts of dye. Here are the samples: Two samples woven for Kodachrome The left-hand sample had less dye, the right-hand sample had more dye. In the left sample, I experimented with having the colors semirandomly arranged in the piece; in the right sample, I tried to line the colors up more precisely. I finally decided that I liked the more intense colors and the semirandom arrangement of colors in the stripes, and wove up 13 yards of this delightful fabric: Fabric for Kodachrome Meanwhile, I had been working with Sharon Bell (the seamstress who helped me with my wedding dress) to develop the pattern for the coat. We selected a simple pattern, Butterick 5259: Then we sewed several muslins, perfecting the fit. On the final few muslins, I drew lines on both the fabric and the pattern, practicing matching the stripes, until I was pleased with the results. We added heavy black piping to the edges to help define them, and lined the jacket in black silk charmeuse. As I was nearing completion on the jacket, Sharon said, “Do you have any fabric left? We could make a hat to go with the jacket.” I had a little over a yard of fabric left ““ plenty to make a hat! ““ so I went hunting for hat patterns. I found a Vogue beret pattern, which could be (severely) adapted to work, and made a little rainbow beret: A hat! A most magnificent hat! And here are the “official” photos of Kodachrome, taken by Joe Decker of Rock Slide Photography: Kodachrome jacket and hat, full view Kodachrome closeup, jacket and hat Detail of Kodachrome The complete story of Kodachrome can be found at https://tienchiu.com/tag/kodachrome-jacket/ .