Tien Chiu

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May 22, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Breakthrough

The last two years have been a bit of a puzzle for me. I’ve done virtually no weaving – which is pretty darn odd, considering I quit my job so I could focus on developing my career as a textile artist. At first I thought it was because I was busy doing other things – mostly, working on my business and fulfilling my duties as Board President at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Both of those took (and are still taking) a ton of time and emotional energy. But two years? I was starting to wonder if I’d made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I seemed to have very little interest in weaving. But I couldn’t seem to come up with anything that triggered my enthusiasm.

Then two things happened. The first was getting a close look at Itchiku Kubota’s kimono, which are both beautiful and masterful. Conceiving and executing these kimono requires not only vision, but impressive technical skills and deep understanding of the design possibilities of each technique. Years of technical mastery are needed to make them.

This is very different from how most textile artists currently work. Current textile art emphasizes message; it’s about what you’re saying with your art, not about the skill and precision with which the art is made. In fact, too-good construction can even make your work suspect, because good craftsmanship is associated with craft, not art. (Insert the usual arguments about craft vs. art here.)

As a result, most of the textile art I’ve seen recently, while powerful, has been pretty simple, technically speaking. Most of it could be composed by someone with just a few years of experience, and made within a matter of weeks or months. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that style; it’s a perfectly valid approach to art, and it results in some remarkable pieces. It works for a lot of artists.

But it doesn’t work for me. My natural preference is for work that is intricate; that combines multiple media; that requires technical mastery; and that takes many months or years to complete. But I’ve seen relatively little modern work that fits that description. (Except for the American Tapestry Alliance shows, which I love!)

So when I asked a lot of established artists how to study and develop a career as a textile artist, much of their advice on who and what to study came from a body and philosophy of art totally different from what I loved. And I didn’t see my style of work reflected in any of the textile art I’d seen. Technical virtuosity seemed stuck in a past that emphasized skill over creativity; modern art emphasized creativity and downplayed skill. Who was doing the kind of complex, technical art that I wanted to do? Where was my tribe?

Alice Walker, in her essay “Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” says:

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.

Kubota made my kind of art. Seeing his kimono sent a shock of recognition through me. This is the kind of work I want to do…that intricacy, that breadth of vision, that fusion of multiple disciplines. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! And – having finally found my tribe – I suddenly felt less alone, and a lot more hopeful.

Another thing that has really encouraged me was a discussion I had recently with a museum curator. We were talking about another jacquard artist’s work, and the person I was talking to said, “You know, I think she did herself a disservice when she decided to limit herself to what could be done on a jacquard loom, as opposed to using whatever technique would help her say what she wanted to say.”

I stopped for a moment, thunderstruck. Oh! Duh!

Because, of course, I had fallen into the same trap. It’s a natural mistake: when you buy a very expensive hammer, it’s hard not to feel that you need to pound a LOT of nails to justify your purchase. So, having bought a jacquard loom, I had naturally been envisioning myself as a jacquard weaver – weaving exquisite pieces that exploited the powerful capabilities of the loom. And focusing on weaving to the exclusion of other disciplines.

But I’ve never been terribly excited about handwoven cloth. (Yes, I know that’s a strange confession for a well-known weaver.) To me, cloth is mainly interesting as a raw material for other processes – dyeing and sewing, maybe origami. And flat cloth? It leaves me, well, flat. Since I had been envisioning jacquard-woven flat wall hangings, is it any surprise that I lost my enthusiasm for starting new work?

The last revelation I’ve had has to do with the question of art vs. artistic career. My style of art is quite different from most of what is currently being exhibited and sold. And because I want to put hundreds or thousands of hours into each piece, building a body of work will be really slow. As a result, taking my approach may seriously impact my career as an artist. I have been noodling unhappily over this for the last two years. Kubota’s kimono have knocked me clean off the fence I was sitting on, because if I can make work like those kimono – or even get close – I do not give a flying fuck about whether I ever have an artistic career.

Which, I think, finally qualifies me to call myself an artist. 🙂

There’s a wonderful passage in Richard Bach’s Illusions that describes how I feel. The protagonist (Richard) has been barnstorming around the Midwest, offering people short airplane rides for a small fee. In the process, he meets the Messiah, whose name is Donald Shimoda. Richard decides he wants to be a Messiah too, so he studies with Donald. In this section, Richard has just given his “Sermon on the Mount” teaching to Donald for the umpteenth time:

I looked at him. “Too wordy?”

“As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of your audience unless you learn to keep it short!”

“Well, what’s wrong with losing ninety percent of my audience?” I shot back at him. “What’s wrong with losing ALL my audience? I know what I know and I talk what I talk! And if that’s wrong then that’s just too bad. The airplane rides are three dollars, cash!”

“You know what?” Shimoda stood up, brushing the hay off his blue jeans.

“What?” I said petulantly.

“You just graduated. How does it feel to be a Master?”

“Frustrating as hell.”

He looked at me with an infinitesimal smile. “You get used to it,” he said.

Having thought through all that, I have some very exciting ideas for combining jacquard designs with dyeing. In particular, I want to cross-dye jacquard-woven cloth woven from cotton and polyester threads. Cotton and polyester are ideal for this purpose because dyes for cotton (fiber-reactive dyes) do not dye polyester, and dyes for polyester (disperse dyes) do not dye cotton. So you can weave a pattern in white on white, print on the fabric using fiber-reactive dyes, and then dye it in a different design using disperse dyes. The finished piece will show the cotton in the fiber-reactive pattern and the polyester in the disperse-dye pattern.

This is a bit hard to envision, so here is a sample I made a few years ago while playing with this idea. The warp is Tencel (or maybe cotton), the weft is alpaca, and it’s dyed with both acid and fiber-reactive dyes. The pale blue fiber-reactive dye is applied first (it dyes both cotton and protein fiber), then the thickened red-purple acid dye is stenciled on. The acid dye dyes the alpaca but not the silk, giving an interesting pebbled texture. (You can read more about the process in this blog post.)

This is pretty interesting in itself, but throw in a jacquard loom and some really interesting stuff becomes possible. For example: suppose you weave an image of a tree, where the tree is woven in polyester and the background in cotton or mostly-cotton. You can weave the trunk of the tree in a “bark” pattern that is mostly polyester with some textured cotton ridges going through it, and then paint different colors/designs on the polyester and the cotton parts of the bark. You could weave birds in cotton half-hidden against a canopy of polyester leaves. Then you could stencil a pattern of light and dark green on the polyester leaves without touching the birds, and come back and paint the cotton birds later.

Or you could go abstract and do shibori or tied-resist dyeing (twice!). Or you could try to do woven shibori! Depending on thickness, polyester thread may be strong enough to use as tie threads…and polyester has memory, so there is also the option of permanently-set crimp cloth. The possibilities are truly endless, and well worth exploring. This could be a LOT of fun!

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings, textiles, dyeing, surface design, weaving Tagged With: cross dyeing

August 8, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Katazome + cross-dyeing – oh, the possibilities!

As I prepare to wrap up the Celtic Braid Coat, I’m thinking about my next project.  I think I’m going to do katazome on warps and mix it up with cross-dyeing.

Here, at least in theory, is how it works:

Starting with a white warp in a cellulose fiber (cotton, rayon, linen, etc.):

First, you apply the resist to the warp:

undyed warp with resist applied (orange square)
undyed warp with resist applied (orange square)

Next the warp is dyed with a red-to-yellow color gradient, and the resist washed out:

warp painted in red to orange color gradient - after washout
warp painted in red to orange color gradient – after washout

Where the resist was, you have white; the rest of it is in the dyed color gradient.

Now, the fabric is woven using a lime green weft:

fabric, woven with lime green weft
fabric, woven with lime green weft

…and a circular patch of resist is applied:

woven fabric with a circular patch of resist applied
woven fabric with a circular patch of resist applied

Now the cloth is dyed with acid dyes in a blue to green gradient.  This will dye the protein weft but not the cotton warp; the result, after washout, should look like this:

woven fabric, dyed with acid dyes in blue to green color gradient, resist washed out
woven fabric, dyed with acid dyes in blue to green color gradient, resist washed out

The boundary lines will not be so neat in real life, of course, as the edges will “feather” during weaving.  But I think it’s an interesting technique with a lot of potential.

Since I have a 10/2 cotton warp already on the loom, this presents some excellent possibilities, as well as a way to use up a 15-yard cotton warp (what was I thinking?).  At Bonnie Inouye’s recommendation, I’m going to weave up some “fabric” with a fine, sacrificial weft this week (one pick every inch or so) and resist/dye the resulting fabric – possibly this weekend, possibly later.  I’m debating whether to keep the warp white before dyeing or whether to dye it with a “base coat”, probably yellow.  Also debating what stencil pattern to carve – I’m thinking flames but am coming up with some intriguing possibilities (phoenix feathers!) in my design class.

This will all take some time, though, so it probably won’t happen until next week, assuming I can finish up the Celtic Braid Coat this week.  (Possibly a tall order!  We shall see.)

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: cross dyeing, katazome

May 23, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Fiber-reactive dye chemistry

After a week of cat-in-ICU stress followed by a weekend at a weaving conference, my body said “Enough!”  I fell over exhausted on Monday and spent sixteen hours sleeping yesterday.  But I feel much better today!

And I have discovered something intriguing…fiber-reactive dyes will actually dye wool and protein fibers in an alkaline environment, in what is most likely a fiber-reactive covalent bond with the protein fibers!  I asked Paula Burch (probably the greatest expert on dye chemistry for small-scale dyers) and she wrote a very interesting reply in the dye forum on her site.  The short version is that fiber-reactive dyes will (mostly) dye wool in alkaline environments, just as they dye cotton.  And the bond is the stronger covalent bond characteristic of fiber-reactive dyes on cotton…so it is very permanent indeed!  The only problem is that the high pH will damage wool, which is why it isn’t done that way.  (Used at a low pH, the bond is the weaker ionic  bond, so is not terribly washfast – definitely not superior to acid dyes.)

This, of course, leads to a rather annoying conclusion: it is not possible to do a “pure” cross-dye by dyeing protein and then cellulose in totally separate baths, since the dyes for cellulose will also dye the protein fibers.  (There are dyes that are designed for cross-dyeing – Dharma’s Alter Ego dyes – but they are hideously expensive.)  On the other hand, this does simplify matters somewhat since it means you only have to process the fabric in one dyebath after weaving.  And it is still possible to do interesting things with two dye processes…I just have to think about how to place colors and designs.

So now I plan to weave up several yards of a couple different patterns – twill blocks, crepes, fancy twills – and experiment with different ways of applying dyes.  I will probably not finish before we move, but it will give me some exciting things to play with before, during, and after the move!

Speaking of moving, the flooring has finally arrived at the installer’s warehouse!  I’m still waiting to see when the installation can begin, but I’m guessing May 28. If that’s the case, we’ll move in mid to late June.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: cross dyeing, house

May 16, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Cross-dyed dye samples

Here, as promised, are photos of my cross dyed samples, woven with 100% cotton warp (10/2 cotton from UKI/Yarn Barn) and 100% alpaca yarn (Henry’s Attic Alpaca Lace, from Catnip Yarns):

Lanaset dye samples
Lanaset dye samples

The Lanaset (acid dye) samples were dyed in the microwave in a vinegar-water-dye dyebath, then removed and boiled in soapy water to remove the (often substantial) stains from the cotton.  (I used Dawn dishwashing detergent as the soap.)  The Royal Blue swatch (top left) was not boiled but soaked in warm soapy water for several hours, which seemed to work just as well (and is probably easier on the alpaca).

The Lanaset dye samples, as you can see, turned out very well for cross-dyeing.  They “took” on the alpaca weft (all samples are turned so the warp runs top to bottom and weft from left to right) but not on the cotton.

The fiber-reactive dyes were another story.  These samples (Cibacron F and Pro MX) were all soaked in soda ash, a small amount of dye added and squished thoroughly through the sample, then placed in plastic bags in a plastic container, and “batched” in a 180-degree oven for about 2 hours.  They were then rinsed thoroughly, washed in hot soapy water, and some swatches were actually boiled in soapy water to see if the color would come out of the weft yarn.  In many cases the weft yarn was dyed (against expectations!) even in an alkaline environment

Here are the fiber-reactive samples:

Cibacron F dye samples
Cibacron F dye samples
Procion MX dye samples
Procion MX dye samples

As you can see, in many cases the fiber-reactive dye dyed both equally, and I’m pretty sure the dye is permanent, since it didn’t come out even after boiling in soapy water.  The colors that seemed to “take” least are the Cibacron F Fuchsia, the Procion MX Cobalt Blue, the Cibacron F Turquoise, and Procion MX Turquoise.  All the yellows seemed to “take”, which is a pity because it means I don’t have an effective yellow in the fiber-reactive range.

(The Cibacron F Fuchsia might have been a labeling mistake, since it appears that it didn’t “take” on the cotton.  I’m suspecting it of being a duplicate of the acid dye Polar Red, though I have no idea how that could have happened!  I will have to re-run the experiment.)

It’s possible that heating the fiber made the alpaca “take” the dye better, so I’m going to run another batch of fiber-reactive experiments, this time batching at room temperature.  I’m hoping that works better!

I’m also going to run another batch of tests using a wool weft, to see if that makes a difference.

On the slate for today: weave more samples, pick up and adore The Fuzz.

Tomorrow I have the day off, so I am going to spray down the weeds in the front yard.  A landscaping company is dropping off 7 cubic yards of compost, and the plan is to apply Roundup to kill the extremely tenacious weeds in the front yard (we dug one out and the tap root was two feet long!), then cover in compost and seed a new lawn with a mix of clover and tall fescue.  The clover will help fix nitrogen, feed the lawn, and look pretty.  The big question is whether to dig in the compost, which will be great for the soil but will take a lot of time and muscle, or whether to leave it on the surface and let worms dig it in for us over time.  I’m kind of inclined to dig it in, if only to give me something to do at the house while Mike is wiring up the electrical circuits.  I need more exercise anyway!

Friday will be the CNCH Fashion Show, and I’m in it.  I have the day off, and am going up there in the morning to drop off my entries.  Then I’m volunteering for two hours, and then I’ll have a few hours to check out the galleries and the marketplace.  John Marshall and Giovanna Imperia will be there, and I definitely want to check out their wares!  And then, of course, is the Fashion Show.  I’ll be modeling Kodachrome and Autumn Splendor.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: cross dyeing, house

May 15, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Not dying, but dyeing!

Thanks for all the well-wishes to The Fuzz!  I’m very pleased to say that he is doing well now and the vet expects to send him home with us sometime tomorrow.  She thinks it was straight-up dehydration from the cold he had last week – she’s still got him on an IV drip, but she thinks we can switch him over to at-home administration of subcutaneous fluids tomorrow.  I’m ecstatic – I hadn’t really expected him to make it, but the Grand Old Man seems to have beaten the odds again.  I know it’s just staving off the inevitable, but isn’t that what life is all about?  After all, in the long run, we’re all dead.  It’s what we do with the time in between that counts.  And I plan to enjoy every minute we have The Fuzz.  He’s a wonderful cat, and I’ll be very pleased to have him at home again.  I know he won’t live forever, but every second counts.

Meanwhile, I have been at work in the dyepots.  I wove up about two feet of cloth – twelve inches in 2/2 twill and twelve inches in 8-shaft block twills – and dyed a bunch of samples with them.  The results were interesting!  The acid dyes, as expected, had little effect on the cotton – though I did have to wash them in really really hot water with soap to get the dye stains out of the cotton.  (Soaking for several hours in soapy water seems to have done it, too.)  However, the fiber-reactive dyes with soda ash were quite variable – some only lightly stained the alpaca and some dyed the alpaca to the same intensity as the cotton!  This explains some of the variable results I got earlier.  I’ll take photos tomorrow.

But for tonight, I’ll just be happy that The Fuzz is improving.  We visited him in the hospital twice today, and he was noticeably better both times.  I hope to have him back with us soon.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: cross dyeing

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