Tien Chiu

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Blossoms of fire

I was doodling along last night, making a cherry blossom motif, and almost by accident found a pentagonal arrangement of the cherry blossoms that is quite pretty:

cherry blossom, pentagonal arrangement
cherry blossom, pentagonal arrangement

In this particular draft, the cherry blossoms would come out about 2″ wide – big enough to be seen, but not big enough to dominate.  So I like this.

The actual draft is different, of course.  I was just doodling, so this is a 24 block profile draft, and I can only get 22 blocks in diversified plain weave.  Nonetheless, I find this pleasing and will probably work a variation up as a sample.  (The final fabric will be in mottled flame colors, of course, after I scrunch-dye the fabric.)

The cotton chenille yarn should be dry tonight or tomorrow morning, which will allow me to wind the rest of the warp and start threading.  I’ve decided to try two types of weft: 1450 ypp cotton chenille, and a doubled strand of 3000 ypp rayon chenille.  I’d like to use the rayon chenille for the weft, because it’s glossier and will really make the cherry blossoms “pop”, but this bathrobe has to be able to stand up to occasional machine washing and tumble-drying (on “delicate” and “low”, of course), and I’m not sure whether rayon chenille will do that, even with a cotton chenille warp to help lock things down.  The fine weft will be 60/2 silk in either case.  I’m a little worried about differential shrinkage (cotton/rayon will shrink, silk won’t) but we’ll just have to see how the sample turns out after wet-finishing.

Update: I just finished doing up the draft in diversified plain weave.  Here’s a simulation of the fabric:

Pentagonal cherry blossom design, in diversified plain weave on 24 shafts
Pentagonal cherry blossom design, in diversified plain weave on 24 shafts

And here is the draft (click to view the full size version)

Draft for diversified plain weave cherry blossoms on 24 shafts
Draft for diversified plain weave cherry blossoms on 24 shafts

I think I have the draft right, but will have to check against my references.  And then weave it up, of course!

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Change in pattern

Yesterday I remembered a wonderful site that has reviews of sewing patterns.  So I went to check out the patterns I’d been looking at.  The first coat pattern looked atrocious (I thought) when actually sewn; the second one has too much flare at the hips, I think.  However, I did stumble across this wonderful-looking pattern from The Sewing Workshop:

Soho coat pattern from The Sewing Workshop
Soho coat pattern from The Sewing Workshop

I don’t know that I’d go for the hood, but the rest of it looks really elegant, and the photos in the pattern reviews look just as good!  And the pattern is designed for 45″ fabric, so will be much easier to cut from 22″ handwoven yardage.  So I’ve ordered a copy of the pattern.

I dyed the black 1450 ypp cotton chenille yesterday, which was a disastrous exercise in things you shouldn’t do.  All of which boils down to, “Never try to dye outdoors when it’s almost too dark to see, you’re tired, and you’ve never attempted this dyeing procedure before.”  I managed to spill the soda ash, cut a hole in my glove (I now have one black finger!), get the dye powder almost hopelessly clumped, and get a huge pile of undissolved salt at the bottom of the dyeing pan, but – thank goodness – I was dyeing the yarn black, so I don’t think most of those errors will show.  It’s currently rinsing out in cold water, and I’ll try drying it this evening.

I’ve also realized that 24 epi will not work gracefully as a sett.  For diversified plain weave, the best way to sett the yarn is three ends to a dent, with the thick yarn and the two thin yarns flanking it sleyed as a single unit.  That works great for 24 epi – IF you have an 8-dent reed, which I don’t.  I do have a 10-dent reed, so I am going to try setting up at 30 epi, using 1450 ypp cotton chenille and 60/2 silk for the fine threads.  (Because I am practically swimming in 60/2 silk, and it’s stronger than 40/2 cotton.)  I also have some 2000 ypp cotton chenille on its way, in case the 1450 is too heavy.

So the next few days will be all about sampling…and then dyeing the samples!  I think the dyeing part will be loads of fun, I’m going to scrunch-dye it in yellow, orange, and red, to produce a flame-colored pattern on a black background.

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Fallow time

Yesterday I was getting a bit crabby (poor Mike!), and realized I’d probably been working under deadline a bit too long.  Simultaneously, I realized that I was going to need a lot more black dye to dye all that cotton chenille yarn.  A LOT more.  Black yarn is dyed at a very high DOS, and the manufacturers of my black dye (Cibacron F) recommend dyeing with dye at about 8% the weight of fiber.  Considering that I have 5 pounds, 11 ounces of yarn to dye, that comes out to not quite 8 ounces of dye powder (!).

I also don’t have the yarn I had intended to use for sampling, 16/2 cotton.  It’s on order and probably won’t arrive until next week.  Ditto the 6 lbs of white cotton chenille I had planned to use for weft.  So my carefully laid-out plans have gone rather astray.

This may not be a bad thing, though.  I believe it’s important to have fallow time between projects (sometimes, anyway), and this will give me some “time off” to recuperate my creative energy.  I’ve started by cleaning my studio, and as a result have seen the floor underneath the loom for the first time in several months.  (You probably think I’m exaggerating.  I’m not.  There was so much detritus, books, weights, film canisters, and random stuff, that the floor was totally invisible!)  While the place is still not neat, at least I have some room to move around.

The coat patterns, by the way, do not have set-in sleeves; they’re cut in one piece along with the body of the coat.  That’s why 60″ fabric is necessary.  I’m still debating between the two coat patterns, and may sew up muslins of both (in cheap terry cloth) to adjust the fit, and see how I like the look.

Another thing I may wind up doing is sampling the diversified plain weave with several different yarns and setts to see what I like best.  DPW is supposed to be woven with a thick yarn 5-6 times thicker than the thin yarn, and my sources conflict on whether this means that the core yarn of the cotton chenille should be 5-6 times thicker than the thin yarn (in which case the thin yarn would be very thin indeed!), or whether the overall diameter should be 5-6 times thicker than the thin yarn.  As you can imagine, this makes quite a difference indeed.  So I plan to sample it both ways.

I know that doesn’t sound very much like fallow time, but these portions of the project are fairly mechanical, not requiring much creative design work.  It’s the Muse that’s tired, not the fingers!

There are a few other technical things I’d like to try (hanging the second warp over a trapeze, for example, or playing with the Ashford Knitter’s Loom), and I really do have to get to work on my presentation for Black Sheep, my weaving guild, but I think I’ll stick to the mechanical elements for now.  My Muse is demanding a holiday!

To answer Alice’s question from several days ago: the book is bound with commercial shantung silk, and is completely covered with a single strip of silk on both sides.  I left about half an inch between pages, and the silk is pretty thin, so that’s enough to account for the difference in thickness between pages when folded.  I think it would work fine with 60/2 silk, not sure about heavier fabrics!

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…to meet the Queen

After spending some time yesterday scoping out bathrobe patterns, I’ve changed my mind: I do in fact want a bathrobe “to meet the Queen”.  My reasoning is pretty simple: bathrobe patterns are simple and boring, and I am constitutionally incapable of doing anything boring!  Also, it would be fun to enter the bathrobe into various weaving shows, and if so, it should be a svelte, graceful, knock-your-socks-off bleeding-edge-of-hot-fashion bathrobe.  I mean, imagine the fun if a bathrobe won a fashion show?

Umm, yeah.  Actually these are the patterns I’ve been considering:

An elegant, knock-your-socks-off, classic coat, I mean bathrobe, pattern
An elegant, knock-your-socks-off, classic coat, I mean bathrobe, pattern
A somewhat less elegant coat pattern
A somewhat less elegant coat pattern
A clearly not-fancy-enough bathrobe pattern
A clearly not-fancy-enough bathrobe pattern
Another unexciting bathrobe pattern
Another unexciting bathrobe pattern

The one problem with the two coat patterns is that they call for 60″ fabric, and I only have a 24″ loom.  I figure I can piece together three lengths of fabric into a 60″ fabric, but that does limit my options for imagery: if I do motifs, I have to beat super-consistently so the motifs match along the sides, which is unlikely, so I’ll need to do some sort of continuous pattern like the Celtic braid.  I think I would also line the coat/bathrobe, on the grounds that a handwoven anything should really be lined, and the coat doesn’t currently have a lining in the pattern.  So I’d have to construct my own lining pattern.

I am currently considering my draft for the bathrobe.  I’ve just realized that diversified plain weave has very few pattern threads compared to the thin threads.  If I use 16/2 cotton as the thin yarn and 1450 ypp cotton as the thick weft, and sett it at 24 epi as Laura recommended, that only gives me 8 pattern wefts per inch!  Which, if you use 24 shafts threaded up with the pattern shafts ascending in a straight line, means that my pattern repeat would be three inches wide!  That’s HUGE!!  I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around using such big repeats.  I’m used to repeats of half an inch to an inch in the warp, because I tend to work in fine threads on straight draw.

As a result of stepping outside my habitual designs, I’m a bit at a loss for patterns to weave.  So I’m putting that question on the back burner and will start the other pre-work, like sewing muslins and dyeing the cotton chenille yarn, later today.  (I’ve decided to ditch the Christmas cards, as you may have guessed.  It sounds kinda interesting, but after the chocolates and the book, I’ve had enough of working under tight deadlines for awhile.)  I also need to weave and wet-finish quite a few samples before I really understand either diversified plain weave of cotton chenille, so there is a good bit of work involved before I start doing up my final draft!  Fortunately, because of the structure of DPW, it doesn’t really matter what pattern of colors I finally choose, it won’t change the drape or behavior of the fabric much (I think).  So I can start experimenting with sett, fine threads, etc. without worrying too much.

Today I will also run up to the KPFA craft show in San Francisco, partly to see Sandra Rude and partly to get some Xmas shopping done!  Despite sending out chocolates to all and sundry, I’d still like to get presents for my immediate family, which means doing a little bit of shopping.

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Hello, world!

I made my first essay into the world of designing diversified plain weave with Photoshop today.  It was surprisingly easy to figure out.  I looked up the basic tie-up/treadling in Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of Eight Shaft Patterns, converted it to a liftplan, saw the basic pattern, and adapted Marg Coe’s method from her book Fit 2 Be Tied to use that pattern overlaid with an image.  (OK, that sounded pretty complicated.  But it wasn’t hard…one thing flowed from another, and the whole process only took about fifteen minutes to work out.  If you’re familiar with Marg’s techniques, it was a piece of cake.)

At any rate, I chose the traditional software engineer’s mantra for setting up something new, and lo and behold:

Hello, World! in diversified plain weave
Hello, World! in diversified plain weave

This was quite simple to work up, and I’m really looking forward to designing the pattern for the robe.  (I am sternly resisting the temptation to use the words “Sleep in!” as the robe pattern.  A little too cutesie for me, though pretty funny.)

I’ve also realized that I miscalculated the amount of cotton chenille required; I hadn’t realized that there are twice as many fine threads as thick threads!  It looks like it will only take about six pounds, which seems a lot more reasonable.  Of course, I ordered a total of 12 pounds, so perhaps I need two bathrobes?  Maybe I could make Mike one, for “his and hers” versions.  (Strongly resisting the temptation to make one say “Get up!” and the other “Sleep in!”, to reflect our different approaches to morning.)