design | Tien Chiu's Blog

March 28, 2014 by Tien Chiu

Getting some rhythm going

Sorry for the radio silence – I’ve been busy weaving!

I have now completed five of the 16 sections – black and white, purple monochrome, orange monochrome, red/orange yellow at low saturation, red/orange/yellow at high saturation.

In the purple monochrome section, I decided to play with stripes. I set the weave structure to be 4/4 satin to even out the color blending, and then wove three sections – each with a different stripe pattern. Here is a subset of the results:

Sample #1 has all stripes equal width, with a regularly repeating color pattern, in both warp and weft. The result is a very rhythmic, even pattern – one that would go well where you don’t want any particular part to catch the eye. Napkins, for example.

Sample #2 has rhythmic stripes in both warp and weft – the color patterns and stripe widths are arranged symmetrically, resulting in a regular plaid. This has more irregularity than the equal-width pattern, adding more visual interest and energy. (Which could also be interpreted as “more busy”, depending on whether you liked the change or not.) This might make an interesting pattern for a jacket, as it adds visual interest without demanding 100% of the eye’s attention.

Sample #3 has stripes in a Fibonacci ratio – each stripe is a Fibonacci ratio to its neighbor – and woven “as drawn in”, i.e. with the same color and stripe-width sequence in warp and weft. Because there’s no symmetry and no repetition, it feels more chaotic to the eye, and because the lighter colors are in the top left, the eye is drawn to the top left, leaving the composition somewhat unbalanced. This might be useful as part of an art piece – or as more visually interesting napkins, depending on how you feel about napkins!

Sample #4 is irregular both in warp and weft, pattern and color. It has no rhythm at all, so it feels the most chaotic of the four samples, and I’d be least inclined to use it. It feels more like a jumble of color than something intentional.

Remarkable how rhythm and repetition affect the feel of a piece, no?

March 23, 2014 by Tien Chiu

Designing on the fly

I’ve now woven two and a half sections of the color study – all monochrome. The first featured black, white, and gray in the warp; the second was shades of purple; the third (still in progress) is shades of rusty orange.

The black/white/gray section of warp was all about playing with value (lightness/darkness). I did one section in (nearly) pure black and white, one section with a wide range of values (white/black/several shades in between), one in whites and pale grays, and one in black and dark grays. By mixing the white, medium gray, and black in the warp with white, pale gray, medium gray, and black in the weft, I managed to cover most of the value spectrum. Alas, no photos – I forgot! As soon as I take that section off the loom, I promise photos and commentary galore.

I similarly forgot to take photos of most of the purple portions, but I do have photos of this bit:

Here I was playing with shaded satins and a dark purple weft. I wanted to see if I could blend from 1-7 to 7-1 satin without a telltale line at the transitions. I spent some time messing with Photoshop to see if I could get it to do a semi-random gradation between, say, a 1-7 and 2-6 satin. Finally I just gave up and “feathered” the edges of the transitions by hand.

The result? I think it shaded very nicely and gradually, without obvious transitions – right up until it hit the 1/7 satin section (the dark purple line in the center). For some reason, this came out much darker than I expected. If I use this trick again, I’ll omit 1-7 satin. But shading by hand is quite laborious, so I may ask my Photoshop-savvy friends if they know a better way. Photoshop is so powerful that I’m sure there must be a way.

For most of the rest of the purple section, I experimented with stripe width and weaving the stripe patterns “as drawn in”. No pictures, alas, but I did enjoy playing with the gorgeous colors:

The leftmost color is actually white, so technically it was only four shades of purple, but they made a very nice value spectrum from light to dark. And apparently four Bluster Bay shuttles isn’t enough; I had to use one of my remaining Schacht end-feed shuttles to hold the fifth color. Fortunately, a remedy will soon be forthcoming: Terry at Bluster Bay Woodworks wrote me recently to tell me that he just got a stock of beautiful curly maple, which will make a nice fifth shuttle to add to the herd.

For the orange section, I decided to try “designing on the fly”. Here’s what I started with:

I decided to weave a design that would feature a motif in pale peach, against a darker background, using all four wefts. Here’s what I wove:

(I did not intentionally set out to say “Hi”, but thought it was a nice touch!)

This design isn’t particularly good, for a few reasons:

First, the medium peach sections near the bottom (below the “H”) distract from the main figure. Second, the golden brown just doesn’t fit with the rest of the colors – there’s too much yellow in it, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. And the main focus point (“HI”) is centered top to bottom, deadening the piece.

So I made some changes and wove a second version:

This still isn’t great art (though if you want to pay me a million dollars for it, I won’t object 🙂 ), but it’s a stronger design than the previous one. I eliminated the golden brown and changed the arrangement of the orange stripes to make it look a little less chaotic; I also put “HI” about 2/3 of the way to the top, making it more visually interesting. This results in a more focused piece.

So how am I designing all this? It’s pretty much all done on the fly. Here is the liftplan I’m using:

The bottom sections are for my convenience – all the shades of 8-end satin, from 1/7 to 7/1, ready to be cut and pasted. The sections at the top determine the interaction of warp and weft in each stripe of color. Shafts 1-8 represent one color, shafts 9-16 a second color, and 17-24 the third color. The remaining 16 shafts are devoted to the white dividers between sections and the selvages.

Each set of eight picks represents three blends of warp and weft (plus the selvages and white dividing lines, which are woven in 4/4 satin throughout). Looking at the liftplan shows the blending of each set of colors.

For example, in the eight rows at the top, shafts 1-8 and 9-16 are 7/1 satin, meaning the weft will heavily dominate those two colors. Shafts 17-24 are 4/4 satin, so the third warp color will weave up as a 50-50 mix of warp and weft. And so on.

So before starting each stripe of weft color, I consider how I want to blend the weft colors with the warp colors. I can make the warp essentially invisible by choosing a 1-7 satin, or I can make it dominate completely by using 7-1 satin. Or I can blend the two by choosing something in between.

Once I’ve decided what degree of blending I want, I go down to the bottom of the drawdown, and cut and paste the appropriate patterns into eight rows of the liftplan. I then repeat that set of eight picks for the length of the stripe. I’ve got six different blending patterns saved in the top part of the liftplan, so I don’t have to start from scratch every time. This gives me flexibility without compromising too much on speed.

Amidst all this busy-ness, I have a new concern. Fritz doesn’t seem to understand that sniffing shoes leads to harder drug use. Here he is with his head completely buried in one of Lieven’s shoes:

What’s next for this shoe-sniffing addict? Catnip?

March 21, 2014 by Tien Chiu

First observations on the color study

I debugged the warp this morning – no threading errors, and only one sleying error! A few other errors along the way, but nothing that couldn’t be solved easily.

And here is the first few inches of cloth:

I dyed the beginning of the warp solid black, to make it easier to catch errors. I used the first few inches to play with complementary colors, blue and orange. Here’s a closeup:

The two bands of orange intrigue me – the one in the lower section is somewhat subdued, and blends nicely, while the second one really jumps out like a sore thumb. This is partly because there is more orange in the top band, and stronger blues in the top band (which naturally makes the complementary color – orange – jump out more). But it’s also because the second band of orange is woven in a different pattern (4/4 satin as opposed to 1/7 satin) than the pale blue and turquoise. Farther away (as in the first photo), all you see is color and the difference really isn’t that emphatic. Close up, the difference in pattern makes the orange really jump at you.

Lesson: at a distance, all you see is the overall (blended) color; close up, pattern can make a huge difference.

Interesting, eh?

It’s really neat that I haven’t even started the custom-dyed section yet and I’m already learning a lot. I’m totally psyched about beginning the study.

Speaking of which, you’ll notice (in the top photo) that the first section, monochrome in black, white, and gray, is coming up. The white bands show where each section was tied off. I’m smug: 13 yards of warp and everything lines up within three inches! I know ikat weavers do better, but I’m still feeling pretty darned good about my dye job.

And now that I’m back, the kittens are back to harassing me. Tigress, for example, loves to curl up in front of my monitor, but only if I’m trying to write a blog post or otherwise use the computer:

She’s so cute, though, that it’s hard to get up the motivation to disturb her. So I spend a lot of my computer time peering around a cat. 🙂

February 2, 2014 by Tien Chiu

Designing color studies

Six days since the last blog post? There must be something wrong with me!

And, in fact, there is – fortunately not anything permanent, just a really virulent cold, the kind where you can’t sleep because of congestion and coughing. I’ve been a zombie the last few days, but this morning I’m feeling a little better. Hope to get over it soon!

When not roaming the street in search of brains to eat, I’ve been doing a little bit of weaving. I have finished my samples and write-up for the 24 More Or Less Complex Weavers Study Group, and am about 25% done weaving projects for an upcoming article in Handwoven. Even with the cold, I should have those done by the end of the week. After that I need to revisit and rework my lesson plan for a two-day workshop on the design process. I’m teaching it at Fiber Celebrations (Ft. Collins, Colorado) in mid-March.

And, finally, I want to get started on some color studies. The topic for this year’s Designing Fabrics Study Group articles is color – and while I could write something abstract, I’d much rather write about something I’ve actually woven. Some of the discussion in the group has been about color “ruts” and how to get out of them. It’s made me realize that I do have my own ruts, and I need to challenge myself a bit more.

What are my color ruts? Well, first, I tend to use very saturated, intense colors. This is partly personal preference – I look great in jewel tones, and I’ve never been a particularly subtle person, so I like colors that make an intense statement. But duller colors are an essential part of the color palette, ones I’d like to use more effectively. I’ve been getting the daily email from Design Seeds, which gives a photo and a palette of colors used in that photo. What amazes me is that, even in relatively bright-colored photos, there are also a ton of duller and darker colors. They play an essential part in making the photo work.

My second “rut” is that I tend to use medium value colors, black, and white. The reason is that I have a very extensive palette of dye samples, but they’re all dyed at the same depth of shade, about 3% dye compared to the weight of the fiber. On silk, that generally yields a medium to dark shade. Of course I can adjust the amount of dye to create a lighter shade, but that can be tricky – colors shift when diluted, often in unexpected ways. So I more often dye to match the sample, meaning I’ve let my dye samples dictate my color palette. Must get out of that rut!

My third rut is color schemes. I tend to use analogous colors, meaning I use colors that are adjacent or nearly-adjacent on the color wheel. This is partly because I like playing with color gradations, but also because analogous colors are easy to use together, since they all “go together”. Unfortunately, they harmonize a little too well, so an analogous color scheme can easily feel a little “flat”. There isn’t enough tension to make it interesting.

So there are a bunch of other color schemes, like triadic (magenta-turquoise-cyan), complementary, split complementary (e.g. blue, orange-red, and yellow-orange), and, well, lots of others. I haven’t explored them much…yet.

I hope I’m giving you a sense for the ton of things there are to be explored about color. The challenge I have right now is figuring out how to experiment effectively with color schemes…on a single warp, since the deadline is coming up fast. This is not the same as doing a classic color gamp – the usual color gamp shows you how colors blend when woven together, which is different from composing an overall color palette.

So far I’m just mulling the possibilities, but I’m leaning towards double weave with two colors in the warp and two or more colors in the weft. Actually I’m thinking of something more complex than that – something like painting both warps in a collections of colors, and even dividing the warps into two or three sections (as with a regular color gamp), each painted with a different set of colors, so I can weave more samples at once. And, of course, I have to design the threading.

Obviously this could easily blow up into something far too complicated to be woven before the deadline, so I need to tame my natural urge to Try Everything At Once. I’ll probably spend a couple days thinking this through, in between weaving off my other commitments and wandering the streets searching fruitlessly for brains. If you have suggestions, I’d love to know!

Finally, in preparation for these color studies, I’ve brought out the dyepots. Which of course excites Fritz and Tigress tremendously. For, after all, isn’t a dyepot really just a big box? Perfect for sitting in.

Fritz and Tigress in the dye pot — Fritz and Tigress, doing what cats do best!

December 30, 2013 by Tien Chiu

Design studies

Over the weekend, having nothing better to do, I blitzed through a number of the design exercises in Joen Wolfrom’s Adventures in Design. The first one was to visit museums, etc. and see how line is used in your favorite pieces – whether the dominant lines are horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, and how that interacts with the format (aka aspect ratio: whether the piece is longer than it is wide, wider than it is long, or equally wide and long). Being lazy, instead of going to a bunch of museums, I went out and bought a couple of art catalogs at the local used bookstore for $3 apiece. This gave me a nice cross-section of artistic styles, and since they were cheap I didn’t have any compunctions about tearing out pages.

Anyway, I wrote down what I liked about each design’s use of line. A useful exercise! It taught me a lot about the internal logic of lines – how they interact with each other and with the piece as a whole.

The second exercise was to go out and shoot a lot of pictures of stuff with intriguing lines, then crop them to three formats: square, horizontal, and vertical. This exercise is partly learning about composition, but it’s mostly about learning how different formats interact with lines. The book mentions that a horizontal piece (wider than long) tends to emphasize horizontal lines, so it’s very difficult to make a successful horizontal piece with a dominant vertical line (and vice versa). Square formats are particularly difficult to manage as they don’t have dominant vertical or horizontal lines, providing no emphasis.

Here is one example of the exercise:

Uncropped image for design exercise — Uncropped image

cropped image - horizontal format — cropped image – horizontal format

cropped image - square format — cropped image – square format

cropped image - vertical format — cropped image – vertical format

The horizontal format was pretty easy, and I managed the square format by emphasizing the diagonal. The vertical format was darned near impossible to get something decent, because of all the horizontal lines. In desperation, I finally cropped to the only vertical line in the photo – one of the columns of the bridge.

On the whole this was a really useful exercise, and I plan to repeat it often (as the book suggests). It’s really about training the eye to look at line in a composition. I’ve already done it with five or six photos and plan to do more.

A second exercise was to take a letter of the alphabet, in some interesting font, and base a design loosely off the letter. Three designs: vertical, square, and horizontal formats. I chose a script letter “z”, because I thought the lines are interesting. The vertical format design was quite crude and not very developed (I may go back and redo it later), but I thought I’d share the horizontal and square formats.

For the horizontal format, I took the lower loop of the “z” and used it as the basis for a line (the squiggly loop at bottom). Then I took the idea of a diagonal line (the top of the “z”)and made a twisty ribbon out of it. (I glued the letter itself to the back of the page, so you can see it faintly through the page as a ghostly shadow.)

original horizontal design, based on the letter "z" (visible as a ghost shadow under the page) — original horizontal design, based on the letter “z”

Looking at it, though, I decided I didn’t like it. The lower loop was conflicting with the open loop up top, so my eye didn’t know where to go. I tried cropping out the bottom part of the loop, and liked the result considerably more:

Now it feels more unified; the jarring loop at bottom isn’t there, and the eye is drawn instead to the parallel and perpendicular lines. Interesting!

Now here is the square design, along with my notes on it:

design based on the letter "z" - square format — design based on the letter “z” – square format

This piece started with the diagonals of the letter “z”, and evolved from there. I’m finding that diagonals work best with a square format (at least for me, at this stage of my development). I added a curvy line as that fit in with the theme of the “z”, and made it in rainbow color so it would dominate the composition, drawing the eye away from the rather stark diagonal lines. I tried a diagonal line in black, but felt the contrast between it and the white background was too stark – now it was competing with the curvy lines for attention. So I made the rest of the lines gray. In retrospect, I’d have made the black line a charcoal gray, not black, and made the diagonal line opposite it the same charcoal gray – darker than the other lines but not as stark as the black. This would have added some variety to the gray lines without overly drawing the eye. I think.

And, finally, for those patient enough to read through to the bitter end, a special treat: Fritz the Shadow Kitty! It’s really funny to see him moonwalking near the end.

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