Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / Archives for handspinning

May 29, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Sketches and spinning

I started my digital painting class earlier this week, and it’s been quite enlightening. The first exercise was “basic” brushwork – a review for many students, but not for me! I learned more about Photoshop brushes in those three hours than in five years of using Photoshop for weave design. Hurray!

Aside from the exercises, we’re also expected to turn in a more creative project in three weeks. This one is designing a fantasy animal that is appropriate for its environment – the more creative, the better. For next week, we’re just handing in preliminary sketches.

This was a great opportunity to play Design Poker, a game I cobbled up for my book. It’s an adaptation of “The Design Game,” from Ideas in Weaving, by Ann Sutton and Diane Sheehan. Basically, you take a deck of ideas, draw at random, and generate a bunch of designs from those ideas. In this case, I used a deck with four types of ideas: weight of the creature (lightweight/heavyweight), number of limbs, terrain where it lives, and its covering (skin, scales, feathers, etc.).

Here’s the result of the first round, which was more about generating ideas than sketches (click to read the larger version). The ideas I drew were “heavy”, “four-limbed”, “marsh”, “membranous covering” (e.g. salamander skin).

brainstorming results for fantasy creature, page 1
brainstorming results for fantasy creature, page 1
brainstorming results for fantasy creature, page 2
brainstorming results for fantasy creature, page 2

If you look closely you can see that not everything fits 100% into those ideas. That’s fine – the idea is to brainstorm designs with help from constraints, not to follow the rules of Design Poker. But the general thrust is creatures that could live in a marsh and have four limbs.

Of these ideas, my favorites are mostly the later ones, which is not surprising since the last 1/3 of the results of a brainstorming session are usually the most interesting ones. (At first, you come up with obvious ideas – it’s only once you start running out of easy ideas and are grasping at straws that really creative stuff comes to light.) I’m particularly fond of the lamprey with legs (now there’s a frightening idea!), the four armed worm that lives in water mostly but can emerge if needed, and the snake with tentacles. I also kinda like the idea of the jellyfish that can walk on its tentacles – another of those creepy concepts.

I’m in the middle of another round of Design Poker, but with a simplified set of ideas. The concepts for this round are “six limbs” and “grassland”. So far I’ve got a six-armed snake with a lamprey head (think “sandworm with arms”) and a few cliches (centaur, pegasus, harpy, etc.), but I’ve only just started. I’m sure better ideas will come later on, when I’ve exhausted the obvious possibilities.

You’ll notice that my sketches are basically stick figures. I anticipate some trouble when it comes time to do the actual sketches – most notably that I’ve never tried sketching an imaginary object in any detail before – but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. The first step is to find ten ideas that I like, and then start developing them into sketches.

Meanwhile, I have completed my first skein of handspun yarn in over a decade! Behold my creation:

first handspun skein in 12 years!
first handspun skein in 12 years!

It’s not obvious from the skein, but the yarn is a smooth color gradation starting at yellow and ending at navy blue. It’s destined to be a sock – hopefully a beautiful one!

I’m quite pleased with my skein. The yarn is pretty consistent in diameter, and the skein hangs straight, which means the spinning and plying twist are balanced. That is relatively easy to manage on a wheel, where you can count revolutions of the wheel to track the amount of twist, but is a bit harder on a spindle since you basically have to work by feel.

Anyway, I think it’s great for a “returning-to-spinning” skein, especially for one done on a drop spindle while walking about. I’m very pleased with it and can’t wait to spin the other sock!

Meanwhile, two spindles arrived yesterday. Here’s the current herd:

spindle collection
spindle collection

That is not quite complete – I also have a KCL spindle and another small Golding ring spindle, but they were off partying somewhere and didn’t make it for the photo shoot.

The veteran spinners amongst us may note that four of the five spindles are Golding ring spindles. That is not a coincidence; they make the best spindles I’ve ever encountered. Perfectly balanced, and rim-weighted so they spin for a very long time. And they’re beautiful!

And in cat-land? Mike, dastardly being that he is, is trying to get them hooked on the heavy stuff. Here they are, investigating fresh catnip for the first time.

cats and catnip
cats and catnip

Fritz was fascinated but largely unaffected; Tigress, on the other hand, was sniffing at it, rolling on it, and rubbing her head against the floor. I wish I’d gotten a video of that!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles Tagged With: digital painting, handspinning

May 24, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Spinning out of control

I started this month with only two drop spindles: a Bosworth Midi 1.5 ounce spindle, and a super-lightweight, half-ounce Golding 2″ ring spindle. Both were left over from my last jaunt into handspinning, over a decade ago.

But then someone advised me that the Bosworth spindle was too heavy for what I was spinning. So I bought a one-ounce KCL (Ken Ledbetter) modular spindle. It’s a nifty idea: the top of the shaft and the bottom of the shaft screw into the whorl, allowing you to swap out shafts and also easily convert the spindle from a low-whorl into a top whorl and vice versa.

After a few days, though, I decided I didn’t like the KCL spindle; it’s not rim-weighted, so didn’t keep spinning as long as I wanted it to. So I started ordering spindles…and things got a bit out of control.

So now I have this lovely Golding ring spindle:

Golding ring spindle - 2 inch whorl
Golding ring spindle – 2 inch whorl

It turned out to be too light as well, so I ordered two more Golding spindles, 1.3 and 1.5 ounces. They should arrive next week.

And then I decided I needed a plying spindle. So I looked through the Golding website to see what they had in the way of larger spindles. And I found this amazing beauty:

 

Golding Ring spindle - "Damascene Flower"
Golding spindle – “Damascene Flower”

Normally I’m not a fan of too-exquisite-to-use spindles (I call them “spindle jewelry”), but this one was calling my name, I swear! So I bought it; it should arrive around the end of next week.

I also ordered some Akerworks spindles – mostly because I love the idea of 3D-printed, interchangeable whorls mounted on a carbon fiber shaft. Modern technology meets ancient craft! They won’t arrive until late June, though.

Meanwhile, the fiber stash has expanded. I visited a friend who had recently started working with metal clay, and traded her my leftover silver clay for a pair of hand carders and some fiber from her stash. I was also completely unable to resist a variegated Lincoln fleece: all those lovely shades of silver! So I spent part of last week washing the fleece and then carefully sorting it into eight shades of gray:

Washed Lincoln fleece
Washed Lincoln fleece
A value scale - in fleece!
A value scale – in fleece!

I’m particularly amused by my woolly “value scale” – eight steps from white to black rather than the traditional ten, but as I don’t have a really pure white or a really pure black, perhaps that’s appropriate.

I’ve also spun up about half of the gradated fiber from last time:

hand-dyed roving

That will go into a pair of socks. I am, however, not knitting the socks myself; instead, I’m trading with a fellow Caltech graduate, who loves knitting more than I do. I’m going to spin enough yarn for two pairs of socks – one for her and one for me – and she’ll do the knitting.

After that? I bought a pair of wool combs and am going to comb and spin the fleece. And then I’m going to weave a blanket. If it’s too warm for California, I’m sure I can find it another home with friends or relatives.

Of course, since I started with a six-pound fleece and my objective is to walk (and spin) about four hours a week, and I seem to be spinning at 0.3-0.5 ounces per hour, this is going to take awhile. If you assume four pounds of usable fiber, that’s 64 ounces or about 128 hours of spinning (being optimistic). At four hours a week, that will take 32 weeks – figure 40 weeks, including plying. So I probably won’t be ready to weave the blanket until next summer. But that’s okay; I’m in no hurry. The objective for this piece is not to create great art or even a practical item: it’s to motivate me to get some exercise. So if it takes forever, so much the better!

The one thing I haven’t figured out is how to manage my fiber supply. With the gradated top, I simply wind it around a wrist distaff (a rope/stick dangling from my wrist) and go. But the hand-combed top I’m making is so light and airy, and the sections so short, that it just falls off the wrist distaff. I’m thinking a very light basket carried on the arm. After that, all I’ll need is a little red riding hood and I’ll be ready to go wolf-hunting. 🙂

But that will all have to wait for me to finish spinning the sock yarn. Two pairs’ worth should take me through August, at the rate I’m spinning.

I guess I’ll just have to exercise more!

Fritz, being a supportive cat, has naturally been encouraging me to exercise. Mostly by making it impossible to get anything else done. Here he is, rolling around on my worktable and suggesting I go for a walk. After giving him a belly rub, of course.

Fritz the ever-helpful
Fritz the ever-helpful

 

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles Tagged With: handspinning

May 17, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Revisiting the long-forgotten

After 10+ years’ hiatus, I’ve taken up another old interest of mine: handspinning. A week or two ago, I wandered down to my local yarn shop, Purlescence Yarns, because I had heard they were stocking weaving supplies. In particular, I had heard that they had a computer-driven Louet Megado, which startled me because that is a mighty high-end, complex loom for a yarn shop to be selling. Having a Megado on their floor meant that they were serious about selling to weavers, so I drifted in to suss out their offerings.

I’m pleased to say that we now have a “real” weaving shop in the Bay Area! They have quite a variety of looms, including several types of rigid heddle looms, table looms, and floor looms (both treadled and electronic dobby). Yarns are mostly cotton, I think 5/2, 10/2, and 20/2 cotton. That’s not too surprising since the majority of weavers use those yarns. They have Lunatic Fringe yarns in a rainbow of colors, plus the American Maid yarns, natural color-grown cotton that Lunatic Fringe also supplies. They also have a lot of other weaving yarns, but I have to admit that I was so drawn to the brightly colored Lunatic Fringe yarns that I didn’t much notice the others. (I am a color magpie, in case you hadn’t noticed. 🙂 )

In addition to weaving supplies and equipment, and the expected array of knitting yarns, Purlescence also sells equipment and materials for handspinning. There’s a largish flock of spinning wheels on their shop floor, plus four or five drum carders, and a wall dedicated to spinning supplies – natural, commercially dyed, and hand painted rovings, plus a little bit of fleece. And other spinning goodies, like spindles, hand cards, blending boards, etc.

If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely check them out. They’re in Sunnyvale, so South Bay folks (like me!) should be especially excited – we haven’t had a good fiber arts shop down here for ages.

Anyway, I had decided beforehand that I was not buying any more weaving yarn – my stash is embarrassingly large already! But ooh, pretty colors! I wound up walking out with a four-ounce braid of rainbow-colored hand-painted roving, 50-50 silk/merino, from Greenwood Fiberworks. It’s gorgeous.

I was berating myself for the complete uselessness of this purchase (I haven’t spun anything in ten years, don’t own a spinning wheel, and had no intentions of picking up spinning again) when it occurred to me that hey, maybe I could use a drop spindle and spin while walking! I had been trying to get myself to exercise more, but was stymied by my subconscious, which has zero patience for anything it considers unproductive. “Are we done yet? Can we go do something useful now?” Having to listen to your subconscious whining in the back seat for the entirety of a one-hour walk is a real demotivator, so I was having trouble getting myself to go for even short walks.

So I got out my drop spindle from a dusty bin of craft supplies, and tried out the roving. It was a delight to spin, and I quickly discovered that I could spin while walking briskly. And my subconscious did a 180-degree about-face: “Oh, can we do just a few more blocks? I want to make more yarn!”So behold my secret weapon for exercise:

spindle + roving = exercise motivator!
spindle + roving = exercise motivator!

Having started spinning again, of course, it was inevitable that I would acquire a stash. So I bought some roving, and traded with a friend to get some hand cards and some of her fiber stash. I now have about 5-6 pounds of various spinning fibers – enough for several years at the rate I’m spinning.

Since most of my new stash was undyed, I naturally had to put some color in it. So yesterday I hand-painted this roving:

hand-dyed roving
hand-dyed roving

It’s Kraemer Yarns’ Sterling roving – 63% superwash merino, 20% silk, 15% nylon, and 2% glitter. Perfect for a pair of fabulous socks. (And I do mean faaaabulous, dahhhling.)

So after I’m done practicing on the rainbow roving, I’ll start spinning this one. I’m thinking a three-ply yarn, Navajo-plied to keep the color sequence intact, would be perfect.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on another long-forgotten interest, origami. I’ve read the first 200 pages of Robert Lang’s Origami Design Secrets – a fantastic book about designing your own origami models. I haven’t studied it at great depth, but I understand the basic strategies that he’s outlining. It’s very well-written and logical in its progression – you can tell it was written by a scientist! (Lang is a former professor at Caltech, and was affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for quite some time.) I’m really enjoying it.

I’ve also tried folding some origami tessellations, but have been stymied by my small squares of origami paper. The tessellation I was attempting begins by nonchalantly telling you to fold the paper into 1,024 squares of equal size, so you can imagine that on an 11×11 sheet of origami paper, those squares are very small indeed! (But don’t look so aghast: you can fold those 1,024 squares with just 64 folds.) So I bought some larger sheets of origami-suitable paper yesterday and will try again this week.

I’m also planning to get in touch with some origami masters this week, to see if I can pick their brains about doing origami in fabric. Fortunately several very well-known origamists are in the Bay Area, so hopefully at least one of them will let me buy them lunch. 🙂

But if not, maybe I can pull some strings. After all, I do have friends in high places.

Tigress surveying her kingdom
Tigress surveying her kingdom

Filed Under: All blog posts, dyeing, textiles Tagged With: handspinning, origami

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