bipolar prison | Tien Chiu's Blog

May 31, 2016 by Tien Chiu

Finished “Bipolar Prison”!

I finished padding and lining “Bipolar Prison” yesterday! Here it is:

Bipolar Prison - finished but not blocked — Bipolar Prison – finished but not blocked

I really like the way the padding emphasizes the bars and the face. The only thing that I’m not totally happy about is the wonkiness of the edges all around. I’m going to try steam-blocking it sometime this week, to see if I can make it more rectangular.

The colored warps came out even more beautifully than I had hoped. It’s hard to get a good sense for the color and texture in the full photo, so here’s a closeup of a small area:

"Bipolar Prison" background swatch — “Bipolar Prison” background swatch

The colors in each small area are unified enough to look “solid” at a distance, but close up, they become streaks of many related colors. That’s because I used three yarns, each with a different fiber content, in each warp. The silk, mercerized cotton, and unmercerized cotton all “took” the dye differently, adding variety to what might otherwise have been a solid blob of color.

The warps also have rich texture to them – physical as well as visual. The three yarns are all different sizes, and are threaded randomly in groups of four, adding a bit of textural interest. I also added some subtle squiggles in the background (“behind” the chain-link fencing) to break up the solid patches of color into something more visually interesting.

The one thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to mount it for hanging. While the padding is perfect for the design, it also distorts the outer edge of the piece, drawing it into unsightly puckers. This would seem to be a good reason to frame it – that way, it could be stretched into a rectangle and pinned in place. But framing is expensive, bulky to store, and expensive to ship. Since I’m planning to send this piece to shows, I’d much rather be able to roll it up and ship it.

So if you have suggestions for how to finish and hang this piece to get a rectangular edge, please leave a comment and let me know!

Finally, some people have been inquiring about Fritz and Tigress. They are perfectly fine, healthy, going-on-three-year-old cats. However, as adult cats, they’re now spending much of their time lazing about, so the pawparazzi have had fewer interesting opportunities to shoot. (Although, there was the “incident” in the bathtub, wherein our two loyal cats gallantly defended us from a giant cockroach that had sneaked in from outside. I had been planning to take a shower, but decided to wait until the local big game hunters were done disemboweling their mighty prey.)

So here are Fritz and Tigress, engaged in their favorite Olympic sport: synchronized sleeping.

May 7, 2016 by Tien Chiu

Finished weaving “Bipolar Prison”!

I finished weaving “Bipolar Prison” this morning, and added some padding to the bars and face. There’s still quite a bit of work to do, but I like it!

Here is a shot of the piece as it currently stands:

I decided to pad the bars and the face because I wanted them to stand out from the background. I could have woven the whole thing as a flat piece, but that would have been, well, flat. I wanted to exploit the flexibility of cloth to accent the elements I wanted to emphasize – the prison bars and the face. So I deliberately wove the piece keeping the layers as separate as possible, and then added layers of cotton batting behind the bars and the face.

Here’s what it looked like fresh off the loom, without padding. The crinkles on the face are physical ruffles: the white layer wove up more loosely than the red/blue layers behind it, so it naturally puffed out a bit. Perfect for padding. The bars, likewise, were a bit loose before padding.

Bipolar Prison - fresh off the loom — Bipolar Prison – fresh off the loom

So what’s left? I need to cut open the bottom layers, add the padding, add a backing fabric, and quilt around the eyes and prison bars. Quilting around the eyes will add depth and make the eyes more expressive. Once I’m done with that, I’ll line the piece and prepare it for hanging. And then I’ll start looking for shows to send it to.

I’m still thinking about what to title the piece. “Bipolar Prison” is the working title, but I’m looking for a better one. The best I’ve come up with so far is “Inside the Prison of My Mind,” which is OK, but which doesn’t capture the bipolar disorder/mental illness aspect. If you have other title ideas, please put them in a comment or email me! I’d love help naming this piece.

May 1, 2016 by Tien Chiu

“Bipolar Prison” progress

I’m pleased to say that I have broken the logjam on the “Bipolar Prison” piece! I finished threading earlier this week, spent yesterday sleying like a demon, and am now happily debugging the warp. There are quite a few errors in the threading and sleying, so I expected to spend up to a week debugging, but it looks (knock on wood!) like it will only require a few days.

There are some tangles behind the lease sticks, so this warp will definitely have tension problems when woven. Regrettable, but I think it can be worked around. And I am not weaving yardage, so as long as I can clear the tension problems in a one-yard section, I think it will all work out.

And the warp is beautiful! Here’s a shot with the red warp on top:

red warp, threaded and ready for debugging

The mottled shades of fire are exactly what I was hoping for, so I am pretty pleased.

I have also finished the initial translation of the image into a loom-ready file. Here is Arahweave’s simulation of the fabric:

If you think this looks disappointingly drab, fear not: the final fabric will have much brighter and more varied colors. The purpose of the simulation is mostly to make sure that all the elements of the image are represented correctly, and that I got the translation right. (Arahweave does have the ability to do a much more accurate simulation, but I decided not to put the time into tweaking all the knobs.)

I decided to put some squiggles into the background to add to the sense of internal chaos. And I thought about using a more complex weave structure for the face, but eventually decided that I wanted the smoothest possible rendition for the face, for which 8-end satin is perfect.

Next steps are to finish debugging the warp, weave samples of each weave structure, then weave aspect ratio samples. After that, I will weave some sample sections to test my overall design. I expect to weave the piece several times over before I’m satisfied. Yes, it will take a long time, but if you want great results, you have to put in the work. Perfection is a very slow process.

March 20, 2016 by Tien Chiu

What you see isn’t what you get

One of the challenges of textile design, especially jacquard design, is that your initial sketch is very likely going to be in another medium – pencil, paint, or perhaps a digital image. Except in very limited circumstances, designing is not done at the loom.

So what’s the problem with that? Well, every medium “thinks” differently. So what you see in the sketch is not at all what you get in the finished piece, even if you work really hard at your simulation. Moreover, you don’t want your piece to look exactly like the simulation. Why? Because cloth is not paint, pencil, or pixels. Cloth has a lot more to offer: texture, drape, and luster, among many other things.

One of the great challenges for me in the “Bipolar Prison” piece is figuring out how to take full advantage of its woven nature. I created the initial sketch in Photoshop, but I want to do more than just weave a digital painting, like a low-resolution printer with limited color palette. But the draw to think in pixels is so strong that it’s difficult for me to visualize textile-specific possibilities. I can’t add them to my sketch, therefore they’re invisible. And so I just don’t think of them.

I talked to a weaving friend about my digital dilemma. “I just can’t think of anything in the Bipolar Prison piece that takes advantage of the fact that it’s a textile,” I said. She replied immediately, “Well, why don’t you do some weaving things? You could vary the texture and size of the yarn in the warp. You could make the bars actually three-dimensional by weaving them in double weave and stuffing the tubes. You could use a different yarn for the face so the texture looks more like skin.”

All great ideas, and fairly obvious to someone who is thinking in terms of woven cloth. But they just hadn’t occurred to me because I had been designing in Photoshop, thinking within the capabilities and limitations of a digital painting. This is the danger of designing in a different medium! What you see is not what you get. Without a conscious effort to think in your medium, it’s easy to lose its special possibilities, and unconsciously settle for a mere imitation of your sketch’s medium. This is the mistake I made in Goodbye, Ma. The phoenix looks almost exactly like the digital painting – but it could have been much, much more.

So, with Bipolar Prison, I’m making an effort to “think textile”. It’s going to be challenging, but also exciting; I hope it will produce a more interesting finished piece.

And where am I on Bipolar Prison? Well, I’ve finished beaming all three warps. (The white warp is not shown in this picture, but it’s on the lower beam.)

fully beamed colored warps for "Bipolar Prison" — fully beamed colored warps

I’ve started threading, but it’s a slow and tricky process. I’m threading three warps at once, from three sets of lease sticks, and because the TC-2 has fixed heddles, threading is an ergonomic nightmare. I’m using a bungee cord to hold most of the heddles out of the way, but the space created is only about four inches on either side, so there really isn’t room to thread comfortably. So I am doing it in small bits, in between rearranging the studio.

I’ve also started work on translating the image to jacquard design. Translating the digital image into something I could process in Arahweave (my jacquard design software) was quite a challenge, and took several hours. My next step will be to design the twenty weave structures used in my design. That will be a serious challenge as well.

Here, just to demonstrate that what you see is not what you get, is the original digital painting, next to the Arahweave-ready image. (The colors don’t matter to Arahweave; they just need to be distinct, and correspond to the correct weave structures.)

Sketch for handwoven art about bipolar disorder, "Bipolar Prison" — Sketch for “Bipolar Prison”

"Bipolar Prison" - prepared for Arahweave — “Bipolar Prison” – prepared for Arahweave

Most of my time, however, has been spent on studio reorganization. I have completely rearranged the furniture in both garage and indoor studio (which meant moving a ton of stuff – literally!), and am building more shelving in both places. I am sore in places I didn’t know I had. I’m estimating another week should complete the reorganization – which is great, because I’m eager to get back to weaving.

The cats are starting to think that all this new furniture-building is old hat. Here’s Tigress, yawning atop the shelving unit I built yesterday.

Tigress, bored with the new shelves — Tigress, already bored with the new shelves

March 8, 2016 by Tien Chiu

New warp + new studio

I’ve been relatively silent the last week or so because I’ve been working on the new warp! It’s a long and tedious process, but I’ve re-wound and re-dyed both warps, and have started putting them onto the loom. This time things are going better, albeit slowly – it takes over 20 minutes to wind a yard of warp, due to stickiness and tangles. (I think my tactical error last time was starting to wind the warp when I was already tired and cranky – my hastiness and irritation helped me botch the winding-on. It’s much easier to be patient when you’re well-rested and well-hydrated!)

Here are some pictures, so you can see the beautiful colors:

Meanwhile, other major things are happening in the studio. Emmy (my 40-shaft loom) was supposed to go visit a friend for a year or so, but for various reasons that wasn’t able to happen, at least not immediately. So my buddy Alfred and I disassembled her on Sunday and have moved her into storage for awhile. That freed up about half the garage (Emmy is a big girl!), so some major studio rearrangement is happening over the next few days. My indoor studio is moving into the garage, to be replaced with more indoor storage, another desk, and some file cabinets. And then I’m going to totally rearrange the garage. Plans are to finish that this week.

So it’s been a busy week! Watch for photos, both of the new warp and the new studio.

(P.S. for weavers: While making the warps, I discovered an embarrassingly easy way to put on a super-wide bout without tension problems. You simply wind one bout, then split it up into smaller bouts and weight each bout separately when you beam on. As long as you separate the bouts far enough down, they’ll behave just like individually wound bouts. This is handy if you want to dye a wide painted warp without having obvious stripes at the boundary between bouts. Of course, your winding equipment has to be capable of winding a very wide warp without too much build-up at the ends. Fortunately, I have a 3-meter Glimakra warping reel, which handles such tasks with aplomb.)