Tien Chiu

  • Home
  • About Tien
    • Honors, Awards, and Publications
  • Online Teaching
  • Gallery
  • Essays
  • Travels
  • Book
  • Blog
  • Dye samples
You are here: Home / Archives for creativity workshop

January 20, 2013 by Tien Chiu

Taught my first workshop!

The workshop is over, and it went really well! The students had a lot of fun, they felt the material was valuable, and I got a lot of great feedback, so it’s all good. We started by simply playing with materials – I brought paints, beads, embroidery floss, and tons of fancy yarns to get them started. I asked each of them to keep an “Explorer’s Log” describing what they tried, what they liked, what they didn’t, and what ideas for finished projects cropped up as they were playing with it. From there we went into generating ideas, making mood boards, and generating designs from ideas. That finished Day One.

On Day Two, I asked them to put together a more considered design from the ten designs they’d brainstormed the day before. Then we talked about what makes a well-designed piece of cloth – function, appearance, and construction. Each person showed off a design, and talked about what aspects of the design  they still needed to investigate. I gave my perspective on sampling, namely, that samples are meant to answer design questions, and your goal in designing samples for a project should be to answer your question as absolutely cheaply as possible – in time, materials, and mental energy. And then the students proceeded to weave samples to answer some of their design questions – or, in some cases, simply to continue exploring the ideas they’d been working on.

While there are some things I intend to change about the pace and timing of the workshop, and maybe one or two content changes, I think it went well, on the whole, and I’m very happy with it.

Here (with permission, of course) are photos of some of my students’ work:

Barbara painting her warp
Barbara painting her warp on the loom

 

Teddie's experiments with warp painting and inlay
Teddie’s experiments with warp painting and inlay
Cookie's experiments (and sheep!)
Cookie’s experiments with warp painting, textured yarns,  and sheep!

I’m teaching this workshop again next weekend (in Carmel), and hope to have some more examples ready by then. The students also thought it would be really interesting if I included an example of my own design process, so I’ll be toting along Autumn Splendor and a couple of the muslins and samples I made for it. Haven’t yet decided whether to put that at the beginning or the end of the workshop, but am leaning towards putting it at the end. It’s a nice way of summing up the workshop, and giving the students food for thought as they go home.

So I’ve taught my first workshop! It was a lot of fun, and I think I gave my students some useful material, so I’m quite content. Looking forward to the next one, next weekend!

 

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: creativity workshop

January 18, 2013 by Tien Chiu

Workshop preparation

Tomorrow I teach my first workshop! It’s about the design process. The students will go from exploratory play to generating ideas to generating designs from their ideas, roughly following the sequence of the book I’m writing. Then we’ll get into refining designs, identifying open design questions, and sampling to answer the design questions. At the end of it, my students will hopefully have a workable design in their hands, and – more important – some process tools to help them the next time they design something. In all likelihood they won’t want to use the entire process all the time (I don’t either), but hopefully they can find some useful tools in the box.

This is my first time teaching anything in twenty years, and I don’t think I’ve ever taught a class solo before, so this will be really challenging. Doubly challenging is the fact that I’m not teaching technique; I’m trying to teach students how to think independently about design. Teaching a technique would be a lot easier. As it is, I really sweated bullets over getting the exercises and sequence right, and I’m still not sure whether the amount of time I gave for the exercises is correct. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow!

Anyway, I’m doing the project-manager equivalent of biting my nails – which is to say that I’m compulsively organizing and planning.  You know, making checklists, reviewing lesson plans, digging through my stash and packing up anything and everything that might be useful at the workshop, etc. I think at this point I’m pretty well-organized and well-equipped. I hope, anyway!

I am also about 2/3 threaded for my Phoenix Rising sample! I hope to get it fully threaded and sleyed this weekend – I have Monday as a holiday, so plan to spend it writing blog posts for Creating Craft and setting up the warp. With luck, I just might do some weaving next week!

Off to bed! I didn’t get enough sleep last night, thanks to the enthusiastic ministrations of a hungry cat (was it really necessary to walk back and forth on my head for twenty minutes at 4:30 am??), so best to get to bed early. Tomorrow is coming soon!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: creativity workshop

January 15, 2013 by Tien Chiu

Rigid heddle sampler

Here’s the beginning of my rigid heddle sampler:

rigid heddle sampler
rigid heddle experiments

Here I was playing with materials (unspun wool roving), textures (furry vs. fuzzy vs. smooth), and a little bit with color (orange/purple and yellow/purple).

Like much of my work, the purpose of this sample isn’t to be a finished work, but an exploration of materials and ideas – taking a concept and playing with it, developing it into something that can be used in a later piece. What I plan to ask students to do is to select some materials and just play with them – not trying to make a finished piece, not worrying about whether it will work or not. Just playing with ideas and what-ifs.

At the end of the exploration period, I’ll ask the students to write down thoughts about their explorations – what they liked, what didn’t, how they could improve the parts that they didn’t like, and how they might use some of the things they explored in actual pieces.

For this example, my notes went something like this:

What I explored:

  • Using unspun roving as a supplementary weft
  • Furry, fuzzy, and smooth textures in a single piece
  • Color combinations – orange/purple/white and yellow/purple/white

How to reproduce it:

  • Rigid heddle loom, 8 -dent reed
  • Kona Superwash yarn, natural, for warp and weft, ~1000 ypp
  • Tufts of unspun roving embedded under three warp threads, with the furry ends sticking out.  Roving is inserted every second pick, and beaten in along with the primary weft. (One pick primary weft + roving, one pick primary weft.)

What I liked:

  • Furry texture is delightful to the fingers and to the eye – looks like soft clouds
  • Fuzzy (trimmed) texture looks like pile rug but probably a lot faster to make
  • Contrast in textures adds interest to the piece – it’s not just flat
  • Orange and purple colors really pop each other – beautiful energy in the piece

What I didn’t like:

  • The bottom sample is probably impossible to wash without losing the fuzzy effect. It would also  felt immediately if subjected to abrasion. Thus, it’s only suitable for a wall hanging or some other art piece that will not be handled roughly or washed. The top sample may be similarly delicate – might be worth an experiment to see.
  • Not very durable construction
  • Fuzzy texture blurs details of design
  • That orange and with that purple is a little too garish
  • Yellow and purple doesn’t work at all – looks awful, in fact.

Ideas this brings up:

  • use roving as fur in the depiction of an animal, or as fog in a landscape
  • a piece with lots of textural contrast
  • a wall hanging, simple geometric shapes with bright colors – showing off the differences in textures between the various lengths of “pile”.
  • a piece with fairly large scale, so the fuzziness doesn’t obscure all the details.
  • use roving “fur” to emphasize design details by adding contrast in texture

The idea of the exercise is to take time to play, and see where that takes you – so often we get focused on a specific project, and forget to explore!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: creativity workshop

January 14, 2013 by Tien Chiu

New adventure

I’m teaching a workshop on the creative process this weekend, and it occurred to me that I should probably work through the exercises in the workshop beforehand, to identify possible snags and to provide examples to the students. Also, I need to write up handouts for the class.

That plus a new-to-me loom has prompted a new adventure:

Cricket loom, warped and ready to go!
Cricket loom, warped and ready to go!

It’s a Schacht Cricket, a rigid-heddle loom which is small and eminently portable. I turned to it out through a mix of curiosity and desperation – desperation because I needed something that would be super-quick to set up, and curiosity about rigid heddle looms, which I (along with many other multishaft weavers) have generally regarded as a toy.

The purpose of this particular workshop is to teach a process for coming up with original designs – starting with a period of free exploration – trying different materials and techniques just to see what happens, and recording the results in an “idea book”. From there it moves into generating ideas, then generating designs from those ideas, and finally into critiquing and improving your own designs. This is something that can be done with virtually no tools and in just about any medium – and to illustrate, I’m turning to a very simple loom, the rigid heddle.

I had intended to do my examples on a table loom, but realized that it would take far more time to set up a table loom than the Cricket, and the table loom is much bigger and heavier – a major consideration since I am also lugging an astonishing array of classroom supplies to the workshop. Also, I liked the idea of demonstrating that creative work can be done with very simple tools.

So I will be weaving an “idea sampler” on the Cricket over the next few days, and putting together an idea notebook based on the sampler. It should be interesting!

I have also made progress on the next Phoenix Rising sample warp – I redyed the pattern warp and put both pattern and ground warps onto the loom on Saturday, with help from a fellow weaver. I’m a bit worried about the pattern warp. Because I had to dye it a second time, it had some problems with tangling – but this time, I left the raddle lease sticks in, and worked the tangles back through the end of the warp with the lease sticks. Despite my best efforts, I think there are still some minor tension differences in the warp, but I am NOT NOT NOT going to wind and dye a third set of warps, so I will forge ahead and hope it all works out. I figure that at worst I can advance the warp a few yards, since the tension differences started out minor and got progressively larger towards the end of the warp.

I also need to write more posts for Creating Craft. I’m about a week and a half ahead at this point, which is not nearly enough considering that I also have to prep for and teach two workshops on back to back weekends, while working full time. I do have next Monday off (it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is a Stanford holiday), so that will help.

Somehow, I’ll manage to get through January. Hopefully February will be less hectic!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: creativity workshop, phoenix rising

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Archives

Tags

aids lifecycle outfits autumn splendor book cashmere coat cats celtic braid coat color study cross dyeing design design class devore doubleweave doubleweave shawls drawing dye samples dye study group gradient colors house infinite warp jacquard loom katazome knitted blanks kodachrome jacket ma's memorial mohair coat network drafted jacket/shawl project network drafting painted warp phoenix rising phoenix rising dress phoenix rising kimono phoenix rising reloaded pre-weavolution project sea turtles taquete tie-dye tied weaves tomatoes velvet weaving drafts web design website redesign wedding wedding dress woven shibori

Categories

  • Africa
  • aids lifecycle
  • All blog posts
  • All travel posts
  • Asia
  • Bangkok
  • Belize
  • Cambodia
  • Central America
  • Chai Ya (Wat Suon Mok)
  • Chiang Mai
  • Chiang Rai (Akha)
  • China
  • chocolate
  • computer stuff
  • creating craft
  • Creative works
  • cycling
  • Delhi
  • Dharamsala
  • drawing
  • dyeing
  • Fiber Arts
  • finished
  • food
  • garden
  • Ghana
  • Guatemala
  • Hanoi
  • Ho Chi Minh City
  • Hoi An
  • India
  • Khao Lak
  • Knitting
  • knitting
  • Ko Chang
  • Laos
  • Luang Namtha
  • Luang Prabang
  • markleeville death ride
  • meditations on craft
  • mental illness
  • musings
  • Phnom Penh
  • powerlifting
  • Rewalsar (Tso Pema)
  • sewing
  • Siem Reap (Angkor Wat)
  • Southeast Asia
  • surface design
  • textiles
  • Thailand
  • travel
  • Vangvieng
  • Vientiane
  • Vietnam
  • Warp & Weave
  • weaving
  • Weaving
  • weavolution
  • writing

© Copyright 2025 Tien Chiu · All Rights Reserved ·

 

Loading Comments...