cats – Page 3

June 22, 2014 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Happy birthday!

No, not to me! To someone much more important. 🙂

On September 22, 2013, the vet estimated that our beautiful kittens were about three months old. Accordingly, we decided that their “official” birthday should be June 21, the summer solstice. It seemed appropriate to give them the longest day of the year, since they have brought so much light into our lives!

So yesterday was their first birthday – they are officially adult cats now. They celebrated by running around the house like crazy, then sleeping like crazy, then spending long periods in front of the screen door, watching cat TV. In short, they continued to do all the wonderful cat-like things they usually do. They are awesome cats and we love them very much.

In celebration, I thought I’d give you a series of photos, one or two for each month since they arrived in our lives:

September 22, 2013 – Tigress at the shelter, investigating my foot

September 25 - Fritz playing with a cat toy — September 25 – Fritz playing with a cat toy

October 3 - kittens attacking the photographer! — October 3 – kittens attacking the photographer!

October 12 – Fritz and Tigress tussling

11-22 - Fritz and Tigress cuddled together — November 22 – Fritz and Tigress cuddled together

November 26 - Fritz and Tigress harassing a human — November 26 – Fritz and Tigress harassing a human

December 10 - Fritz and Tigress playing with boot laces — December 10 – Fritz and Tigress playing with boot laces

December 13 - Fritz the incredible flying kitten — December 13 – Fritz the incredible flying kitten

January 20 - cats in the dyepots! — January 20 – cats in the dyepots!

February 20 - a sleeping Tigress — February 20 – a sleeping Tigress

February 24 - Fritz lounging about — February 24 – Fritz lounging about

March 22 - Tigress eating asparagus — March 22 – Tigress eating asparagus

March 24 - Fritz guarding the laundry — March 24 – Fritz guarding the laundry

April 19 - Tigress and Fritz exploring a new piece of furniture — April 19 – Tigress and Fritz exploring a new piece of furniture

May 4 - Tigress playing peekaboo — May 4 – Tigress playing peekaboo

May 11 - Who shredded the paper towels?? — May 11 – Who shredded the paper towels??

June 9 – Feline harassment at its best!

So happy birthday to Fritz and Tigress! May they sleep like crazy, run around the house like crazy, and be their utterly adorable selves for many more.

November 10, 2013 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Carving stencils

I’m preparing to play with surface design on warps. The basic idea is pretty simple: stretch a warp out on a long table, then apply paint and/or dyes to the warp. Reel the warp back onto the loom, and weave it with whatever structure you choose. Easy, right?

Well, yes and no. Surface design on warps is a bit like playing a violin. Any fool can pick up a bow and make noise, but making music with a violin requires considerable technical mastery. And getting controlled effects on unwoven warps can be, well, complicated.

For example, here’s an experiment I did last year, using screen printing on warps:

two tigers screen-printed onto an unwoven warp

As you can see, even though the images are printed cleanly onto a perfectly tensioned warp, there is considerable distortion when woven. The circles flatten into ovals, and the edges distort and blur. Also, the diagonal lines of the weave structure (a reversing twill) further obscure the image.

This example was made using the simplest approach: screen printing onto a warp that is already on the loom, printing in the small gap between the reed and the fell of the cloth. This method produces the cleanest picture, but is limited to printing that can fit between the reed and the fell. (On my loom, that’s about eight inches.) And distortion still appears at the edges.

For the kimono, I need a panel about five and a half feet long, so this approach won’t work. So I’ve decided to use the other commonly used method – stretch the warp out on a long table and do the printing on the table. To minimize distortion, I’m weaving the warp into very loose “cloth” using a superfine weft, with about an eighth of an inch between picks. I wove a stick in at the beginning and end of the section to be printed, and will use those to stretch out the section evenly on the table for printing.

But before I can print on the warp, I need something to print with. So I spent a good chunk of time this afternoon making these stencils:

The big stencils are about nine by thirty inches; the small one is about two by four inches.

I plan to use these stencils to test a couple of things:

lengthwise distortion due to take-up: the image will shorten as the fabric is woven, but how much?
clarity of woven image with a very simple weave structure (plain weave)
distortion of edge details

In particular, I am using the small phoenixes to test the amount of detail possible in an image, and the large phoenixes to test what happens to a larger design. I’ve prepared 36 inches of warp, which is enough to print two large and many small phoenixes. Now I just need to finish the stencils, which will take another day or two, and I’ll be ready to experiment.

(The stencils, by the way, are carved from fusible interfacing – the heavy “craft” type. Two layers of interfacing, fused together with a layer of nylon tulle in between. The tulle stabilizes the tiny details and the interfacing makes the stencil. I need to coat them with two layers of latex house paint and iron the paint to heat-set it; after that they’ll be ready to use. This technique is covered in detail in Jane Dunnewold’s excellent book Complex Cloth.)

I do plan to experiment with katazome (Japanese paste-resist dyeing) later, but for the first trial or two, I’m going to keep it simple and stencil rather than play with resists.

Finally, I went to a friend’s help-out-with-gardening party today, and when I came home, a certain black kitten was fascinated by my shoes. Here is Fritz, with his head stuffed eagerly into my left shoe:

Fritz in my shoe — Fritz investigating my shoe

Apparently the kittens have not yet discovered feline dignity. 🙂

November 8, 2013 by Tien Chiu 4 Comments

What next?

Chocopalooza is over, except for some cleaning that I’ll be doing this weekend. Which means it’s back to work. 🙂

I’m at a crossroads. While the Phoenix Rising kimono is definitely at the top of my list, I also want to get back to the book. (No, I have not forgotten about it!) At the same time, I’m unpleasantly aware that the Convergence Fashion Show deadline is just three months away – which is practically tomorrow, at least for me. If I work obsessively on the phoenix kimono and don’t make radical changes to the design, I might be able to get it photographable in time. However, there is a huge flaw in the design, which I mocked up today:

The design looks good at a small scale, because the eye interpolates the blocks into a smooth curve. However, at a larger scale, it looks distinctly pixelated. Unattractive at best. (The image on the blog is a small version that actually looks smoother than the real thing would; if you click on the image to get the full size version, and view it at 100%, you’ll see that each block is huge.)

So, to get an attractive phoenix at large scale, I need to turn to other methods. I’m thinking surface design on the warp – either stenciling directly on the warp or stenciling on a resist (katazome) and then applying dyes/paints. This would give me the beautiful phoenix pattern I’m after. However, I’m not familiar with this technique and I certainly won’t have time to figure it out and still make the Convergence entry deadline. So I can either go with what I know, and have a less-than-perfect piece to enter into the Fashion Show, or I can skip Convergence 2014 and continue to refine my design.

Well, that’s a pretty obvious choice, at least for me. I’d rather have a knock-your-socks-off piece for the next Convergence than a mediocre piece for this one. So I think I’m going to sit this Convergence out. That also means I can skip going to Convergence, which will be useful since there are several other expensive, vacation-consuming things I’d like to do next year. (Two weaving conferences, a three-day chocolate class, and a one-week katazome class with John Marshall.) I’m a bit disappointed to be missing Convergence, but I think it’s better than working in a panic for three months to turn out something that doesn’t meet my standards for a show piece. There will be other shows.

So the next few steps will involve experimenting with stenciling on warps – katazome and “regular” stenciling, I think. I can use the warp I currently have on the loom – which is threaded up for summer and winter, but which can be used just as effectively (I think) for plain weave. I’ll have to do more stenciling experiments later using whatever structure I settle on, but this will work to get an initial “bead” on the techniques and processes involved.

And, for the kitten-watchers, here is what happened shortly after I sat down in front of the computer this morning:

And, of course, that shortly led to this:

Fritz AND Tigress "helping" — Fritz AND Tigress “helping”

So what could I do? I got up to take a break. Which, of course, resulted in this:

Fritz and Tigress engaged in territorial combat over who gets to sit in my (warm) chair — Fritz and Tigress arguing over who gets to sit in the (warm) chair

Tigress eventually won, and I had to (gasp!) evict her after I came back from getting a cup of tea.

November 5, 2013 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

A sense of scale

I’ve often wondered how to convey the enormity of ninety pounds of chocolates. The stack of containers is misleading, because each container is only about 2/3 full, and the pile of boxes, while pretty, doesn’t really give you a sense of the sheer quantities involved.

Of course you can work out the calculations: most of the bonbons weigh .45 ounces apiece, and if you divide ninety pounds by .45 ounces, you get about 3000 chocolates. It is actually probably considerably more than that, considering that the fudges and caramels weigh slightly less, and the candied citrus peels even less. Figure 3,500 or so.

But those numbers are still hard to visualize, so I did a little experiment to make things a bit less abstract. First I filled a sheet tray with chocolates – one of those big, professional-bakery sheet pans, 18 x 26″, and got my friend Lieven to photograph them for me:

It turned out to hold a bit over three flavors. So ten sheet pans would hold nearly all the chocolates (some flavors, like the fudges, toffees, and caramels, had significantly more pieces than the bonbons on the tray).

That was still hard to visualize, so I laid out three more sheet pans, which completely covered our dining room table (which seats six people):

a dining room table's worth of chocolates! — a dining room table’s worth of chocolates!

Extrapolating, ninety pounds of chocolate is about 2.5 dining room tables covered in chocolates.

Or is it? About 15-20% of the chocolates were rejects, and didn’t make it to the sheet pans. Adding an extra twenty percent to cover the rejects adds another half-table, for a total of 12 big sheet pans or three dining room tables covered in chocolates.

All in all, quite a production.

Meanwhile, a different sense of scale:

Fritz, on 9/22 (the day we adopted them) — Fritz, on 9/22 (adoption day!)

Yep indeedy, them kittens be growing. (In another week or two, they’ll have doubled their weight since adoption!)

November 4, 2013 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Presenting the 2013 fall collection

Ninety pounds, two ounces of chocolaty goodness:

I’m pleased to say that we finished the final chocolates at 4:30 pm on Saturday, which is a new record – last year I was making chocolates into the wee hours! The last day of chocolate-making was uneventful, except for two minor disasters. The first was me spilling an entire freshly-poured tray of caramelized banana ganache on myself while trying to juggle two big sheet trays. (Which, in retrospect, was a really stupid idea, but it was 4:30 am…) By some miracle, 90% of it fell back into the bowl, leaving only about 10% splattered over my shirt, my jeans, and my hair! Time for a trip to the washing machine, and a second shower.

Astonishingly, I did not have feline help for that particular disaster: I did it all by myself! However, the second minor disaster was entirely feline: the kittens discovered toilet paper. What a mess! I replaced the roll, making sure there were no sheets hanging off the bottom, and fortunately they have not rediscovered it. Kittens!

Anyway, yesterday was the annual chocolate-packing party, and six friends came over to help me pack. First we packed all the chocolates into candy cups:

Then we spread out all the containers of yummy chocolates onto the table, so we could pack them into candy boxes:

In the end, we packed sixty-nine beautiful boxes of chocolates:

Fifty-five of those got packed into shipping boxes, and will go to the post office this morning.

And here is a beautiful shot of a few trays of chocolates, courtesy of my friend Lieven (who also took the other photos and did my flavor inserts – thanks Lieven!):

And that’s it! Chocopalooza is over for the year, except the cleaning.

Finally, here is Tigress, investigating one of Lillian Whipple’s beautiful fine-thread samples:

Tigress investigating woven samples — Tigress investigating handwoven samples

And Fritz, observing on my desk:

It’s funny – people who were over for the packing party looked at them and exclaimed, “Wow! They’re so tiny!” Whereas I’ve been looking at them thinking, “Wow! They’re so big!” But of course I remember the tiny little balls of fluff that came home with us six weeks ago, and they are thinking of adult cats. I guess it’s all a matter of expectations. Regardless, they are infinitely adorable, even if they have discovered toilet paper. 🙂