handwoven clothing | Tien Chiu's Blog

August 14, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Patience, grasshopper!

I’ve been feeling quite impatient recently, on several fronts:

The warp is taking longer than I expected to put on. I finished winding the thirty-one MILES of thread yesterday, and put it laboriously onto lease sticks and started threading this morning. It’s taking me 12-13 minutes per inch, which comes out to about 5 inches/hour, or about four and a half hours for the twenty-one inches left to thread. It will probably take another two hours to sley the reed, and then I have to make some loom adjustments before I’m able to start weaving – so it will probably be Tuesday at least before I can actually get weaving. I’d hoped to get there sooner!
The latest issue of Handwoven is out, and my Kodachrome Coat is the cover!! I’ve been reading everyone else’s squeals of joy at the latest issue and feeling terribly left out – my copy hasn’t arrived yet, and I’m starting to wonder if it ever will! I can’t wait to see it.
I haven’t had the time I wanted to work on muslins, and between weaving and the Handwoven article I’m working on, not to mention some upcoming work as Complex Weavers Publicity Chair, it feels like I’m never going to get there.

In short, I’m feeling overcommitted, impatient, and frustrated.

Which is why it was such a delight to get a comment from a blog reader on a post I wrote long, long ago, from Southeast Asia. It made me go back and reread the post, which is indeed delightful, and which reminded me of the joys of the road, and the fun in just letting things go and trusting in the universe to carry you where you want.

Here is the post: https://tienchiu.com/2002/11/arrived-in-ranong/. (It’s really hard to summarize without mangling, so I’ll just let you read it yourself.)

Having read that, I’ve decided that I’ve been focused too much on expectations, and need to let go of my mental to-do list. It’s not the doing of things that is stressing me out, but the juggling of all the to-dos in my head. So I’m going to write all the to-dos down in Evernote, organize them in order of importance, and then take the top item from the list and forget about all the others. One thing at a time, and don’t fret the rest. (Oh, and have fun along the way, too, because fun is the whole point, isn’t it?)

And, because every blog post should have a picture, here is the fully-beamed warp beam, with 55,000 yards (3.75 lbs) of 60/2 silk neatly wrapped around it. Isn’t it a thing of beauty?

August 7, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Playing with my food

I made fourteen fruitcakes today – nine large and five small. Lots of fun! I used six kinds of candied citrus peels – bergamot, Seville orange, yuzu, citron, Meyer lemon, and Rangpur lime – plus the candied sweet cherries and candied sour cherries that I’d put up earlier in the year. I also discovered, poking around the garage, that I have an embarrassingly large collection of candied citrus already – in addition to the six varieties just mentioned, I also have candied grapefruit and lime peels, for a total of eight varieties. And I’m about to add blood orange peel to the mix, as the ninth variety. What can I say? I like candying citrus peels. And it makes great fruitcake!

The last batch of mixed citrus peel to reach the cutting board glowed so beautifully in the afternoon sun that I couldn’t resist taking a photo:

After about two hours of chopping, all 18 pounds of “goodies” were done:

(I put a stick of butter at the back of the photo (near the center, the silvery reflective rectangle) to give you an idea of the proportions. For reference, the heap of goodies is about 8 inches tall!)

Then it was just a matter of mixing up the batter (20 eggs, 8 cups flour, 18 oz pineapple juice, 2 lbs of butter, 4 cups sugar, plus baking powder and salt), pouring it over the yummy bits, and then mixing up by hand – literally! I didn’t quite get elbow-deep in the fruitcake batter, but I was in up to my (well-scrubbed) f0rearms as I mixed it about with my hands, feeling for any not-quite-even portions.

(The nice thing about being an adult is that one can play with one’s food and not have to worry about Mommy coming by to tell you not to! Although, in this particular case, Mommy actively encourages it – she likes fruitcake, too…)

Somewhere in between all that, Mike and I managed to get the Fireside temple on the loom. I’m not sure if it’s going to work – currently it looks like the construction of the temple does not play nicely with a narrow X-frame loom. It goes on, but it looks like I’ll lose about 2″ total weaving width if I want to use it. On a 60″ loom, no big deal. On a 24″ loom, much bigger problem. I’m going to mess around a bit more, though, before deciding what to do.

I have also wound two more bouts of the new warp, and have calculated that it takes about 20 minutes to wind, tie off the cross, and beam on one 37-yard bout. So now I have twenty bouts left to go, or a bit under 7 hours. Since my time during the week is somewhat limited, and I have some other commitments to tend, I think my goal this week is to be 100% beamed-on by Friday, so I can start threading in earnest on Saturday. Ideally, I’d like to be weaving by next Monday, but that might be a bit ambitious.

July 16, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Jacket (with shawl collar)

I went to see Sharon this afternoon, four muslins in hand. Three of them were reasonably successful, but we looked at the coat and concluded that it was simply too large. The coat pattern drafting instructions were created for coats in colder climates, where a coat would be worn over a jacket or a sweater – but here, in California, it’s likely only worn over a T-shirt or blouse, and so needs less ease. Also, the collar (a wide, round collar with stand) doesn’t work. I will redraft that pattern from the base jacket pattern, once we finish correcting it.

The jacket with the shawl collar fared somewhat better. The back, as before, turned out great. The front required some adjusting – the shoulder seam needed to be moved, and a few minor tweaks. The sleeves were a total disaster, and Sharon completely redrafted the sleeve cap for me. She warned me that it might be too tight now, but we can always fix that in the next go-round. We both agreed that we liked the collar.

Here is a pic of the jacket, with collar:

Second jacket muslin, showing the wide shawl collar

The plan is to use a white-on-black Celtic braid fabric, which looks silver-and-black because of the visual blending, with a black leather collar. Something like this, in fact:

Celtic braid fabric against black leather — Celtic braid fabric against black suede

It won’t be quite like this, because the real-life braid will be slightly larger-scale: I think this sample was sett at either 72 or 96 epi and the actual fabric will be sett at only 60 epi or so. But it’s a good first approximation.

I did feel, however, that this design was lacking in tension: because the primary values are gray and black, it just didn’t feel very exciting to me. Sharon had a brilliant idea: add some white piping around the edges of the collar:

jacket fabric with leather and simulated white piping — Celtic braid fabric with black suede and simulated white piping

See how that ups the value contrast and hence the drama of the piece?

The current plan is to put the white piping around the outer edges of the shawl collar, and on down the center front. Also to add cuffs (in black suede, of course!) with white piping around the edges.

This is now sounding suspiciously like an Art Piece rather than a casual T-shirt for office wear. It’s a good thing you all know me, or you might be surprised or something. 🙂

Plan for tomorrow is to run a bunch of errands, finish my dress form cover (so I can use the dress form!), and install my new Fireside rolling temple on my loom! The pieces arrived today and I can’t wait to get them on the loom, so I can see if it works on my AVL Workshop Dobby Loom.

I’ll probably also redraft the jacket pattern, too, and may modify and redo the palazzo pants pattern, if I’m feeling ambitious. I probably won’t get to the kimono jacket pattern, which works pretty well (it’s dead simple) but does require a few modifications.

Off to bed! Tomorrow is a whole new (and exciting!) day.

July 14, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Busy bee

While I have not been weaving, I have been busy the last few days with pattern drafting! I discovered a few days ago that I had been drafting off the wrong sloper, so I redrafted the torso foundation and jacket foundation, and added a coat foundation to the mix! (Yes, I am still thinking about completing my cashmere coat.) I then transferred all the foundations to manila pattern paper (aka oak tag, a very heavy paper about the weight of posterboard, useful for designs that will be reused). Then I redrafted the jacket pattern, and am in the process of drafting the coat pattern. I am currently debating the size and style of lapels that I want – previously I had been meekly using what the pattern drafting software suggested, but now, the sky’s the limit!

Here’s a not-very-good photo of the jacket pattern:

This evening I’ll draft the coat pattern (it’s mostly a question of collar and lapels), and then I’ll sew some more muslins, before going to see Sharon on Saturday.

I also plan to finish weaving off the sample warp. It’s coming out beautifully, except I’m having a LOT of breakage of warp threads on the left side. I finally gave up and just pulled out the broken warp threads, so I’ve lost nearly an inch of width. I wouldn’t do that if this weren’t a sample, but it’s saving me from pulling my hair out. I haven’t been able to figure out the cause, but it’s driving me crazy!

Next on the loom will be some samples for my next article in Handwoven, then I can start winding my (gulp!) 37-yard warp for this next series of garments!

July 12, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Fiber content

I’m now contemplating potential wefts. My calculations tell me that if I want 6-8 yards for each garment, I’ll need 300-400 grams of weft for each. Running a search through my yarn database (at http://creator.zoho.com) revealed that I have four weft options: cotton, silk, merino wool, and linen. (The warp will be 60/2 silk.) So I’m considering what to use.

Linen is out. I know some people mix linen and silk, but I’m really not sure why: they are pretty much opposite in character, and have opposite care requirements. Linen is crisp and requires a hot iron; silk is drapey (unless the sericin is left in), and needs to be pressed at low temperatures. So I don’t think I’ll mix the two.

That leaves cotton, silk, and wool. Silk, of course, is wonderful stuff, and I have piles of it. So why would I consider cotton or wool? Well, cotton would allow me to cross-dye the finished piece, since silk takes acid dyes and cotton does not. This could come in handy, since it will allow me to dye the warp while leaving the weft (relatively) unchanged. Since I will be using the same (white) warp for all four pieces, this would give me more color variation. Cotton is also relatively easy to care for – you can toss it into the washer (on delicate) without worrying about felting.

Wool, of course, does felt, but it has a few advantages, too. Because wool felts, darts can be shrunk out easily. I’ve wanted to try the couture technique of shrinking out darts for awhile; wool would make that much easier, which is good for a novice. (Silk can be shrunk as well, but not as much and not as easily as wool.) It can also be cross-dyed when combined with silk, giving more color variation. It’s not as lustrous as silk, so if wool is used as a background, the silk will look shinier by comparison.

I think I will very likely use all three: wool for the jacket (and maybe the jacket-blouse); silk for one tunic, silk/cotton for the other. But, obviously, I will have to sample!

I also need to work out yardage requirements. My best guess is that it will take 8 yards for the jacket (and maybe the jacket/blouse), and 5-6 yards for each tunic. (Remember that my fabric is only 24″ wide!) That, assuming 15% shrinkage (take-up is about 7.5%, shrinkage about the same), plus one yard of loom waste, means I will have to put on my longest warp yet – 34 yards! I will probably allow another 3 yards for sampling (my warping wheel, without modifications, has a three-yard circumference), so that might be 37 yards. That’s a mighty long warp (for me anyway), but with only one shuttle to contend with, it ought to weave off relatively quickly. And I can cut off between pieces, and sew one while weaving another.

Off to work! I have an early morning meeting, but that just means I can come home (and start weaving!) sooner.

Finally, here is the pretty picture for today:

I’m pleased to say that my colors are matching, and the woven web is just beautiful. Can’t wait to see it wet-finished!

Off to work!