Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / Archives for katazome

April 8, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Jacquard study

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few days studying jacquard weaving. No pretty pictures yet, of course – the loom won’t arrive for another four months! But it is becoming obvious to me that it will take serious study – a month or two at least – before I’m prepared to do any serious jacquard design. I would like to work with a wide range of structures, and to do that I need to understand each structure and how to construct it, either in Photoshop or jacquard weaving software. I’d also like to evaluate jacquard weaving software – probably Arahweave – to see if the features justify purchasing it over Photoshop. That means installing it and playing with it to understand how it “thinks”. All that will take time, so it’s a good thing I have several months to work on it!

I’ve started my education by rereading The Woven Pixel by Alice Schlein and Bhakti Ziek. This has lots of great information about using Photoshop for jacquard design. I’m also reading through Digital Jacquard Design by Julie Holyoke, which is very good but quite dense. I’m trying to get through both books this week, if possible. Next week I go back to work, and between that and writing my book, I will have much less brainpower at my disposal. I doubt I can achieve a full understanding of both books in the next five days, but I can at least make a decent start.

I also had a wonderful visit with Susie Taylor, a very talented weaver who lives nearby. Aside from being an wonderful handweaver (her woven origami pieces are amazing), she’s also an industrial jacquard designer, and has generously offered to help me figure out jacquard design. I visited her studio yesterday and she showed me a big pile of jacquard samples she had designed for industry. It was eye-opening. Most of the handwoven jacquard pieces I’ve seen have been quite simple, structurally – shaded satins, double twills, lampas. Susie’s work included matelasse (with a stuffing weft held between two layers), tissue weaving (an extra weft inserted in certain areas of the fabric, but not used through the entire piece), and seemingly complex color patterns that use just two wefts at a time, as in Fair Isle knitting.

And those techniques were just the tip of the iceberg! It was fascinating to see the variety of structures and techniques used in her designs. It gave me a lot to chew on – there is far more freedom in jacquard design than I had thought. It reminded me of the Shakespeare quote, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, that are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Certainly there is more than I had dreamed. I’m really excited, and looking forward to learning more.

Speaking of the book, I am almost done! I’m currently writing exercises for the last few chapters – only three or four more exercises to go. Then some clean-up work, and I’ll be ready to send it out to artists so they can review their quotes and send me any photos they are willing to provide. I’m hoping to finish this by the end of the week, and start sending out the book next week. That is two weeks ahead of schedule. Which is wonderful – but I’m trying not to get complacent. There is still a lot to do between now and August 1 (the publisher’s deadline for the manuscript), and I’m sure to hit some roadblocks in between. So I am doing my best to get ahead of schedule and stay that way.

Katazome-wise, I am pleased to say that I managed to get some good screen prints with katazome paste. Here are two of my samples:

Celtic knotwork in screen printed katazome paste
Celtic knotwork in screen printed katazome paste
screen printed katazome paste - attempt at fine details
screen printed katazome paste – attempt at fine details

In the second photo, I was  testing to see how fine a line I could produce. It looks like 0.5 or 0.7 mm is the finest line I can achieve. In the top design, only part of the elaborate, delicate scrollwork appears. In the bottom design, which is a bit bolder, the pattern comes out perfectly.

(For the technically curious, to get this to work, I switched to a bell nose squeegee – the kind Speedball puts out – and held the squeegee at a 45 degree angle for the first 2 passes, then at 20 degrees for the final pass. This deposited a heavier layer of katazome paste than previously, thick enough to stand up to a stenciling brush.)

Finally, here is a lovely photo of Tigress napping. She looks so adorable and innocent in the photo, you’d never suspect her of having shredded an entire roll of toilet paper a few days before.

Tigress napping
Tigress napping

 

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, surface design, weaving Tagged With: katazome

April 3, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Screen printed katazome paste

I hadn’t planned to do more katazome, but some little section of my brain whispered, “Didn’t John Marshall say you could screen print with katazome paste?” And I still had a cup or two of the katazome paste left, enough to do some experiments. So I did. Here are the results:

screen printed katazome paste - indigo dyed
screen printed katazome paste – indigo dyed
screen printed katazome paste - using credit card as squeegee
screen printed katazome paste – using credit card as squeegee
screen printed katazome paste - using screen printing squeegee
screen printed katazome paste – using screen printing squeegee

If you click on the photos for the larger versions, you’ll see that the katazome paste did fairly well, but there are blotches of paint in some of the resisted areas, especially in the versions where I applied paint with a stencil brush rather than dipping the piece into an indigo vat. I attributed that to insufficient coverage, either because the squeegee didn’t deposit enough paste through the screen or because the paste was too thick. This afternoon I tried again with thinner paste and a ball-nosed (rounded edge) squeegee, which is supposed to deposit a thicker layer of paint when screen printing. The results look promising so far, but the paste is still drying; I’ll know more later this afternoon, after I get a chance to play some more.

I’m super excited about the prospect of screen printing katazome paste, if I can get it to work reliably. Since I have a thermofax machine, I can create a screen in less than a minute, given a black and white starting image. This is much faster than spending hours carving and painting a stencil! And screen printing allows more design options than stenciling. So if I can get this to work reliably, I’ll be in dyer’s heaven.

Meanwhile, I have completed the second qiviut scarf and am rolling straight into the second sea-turtle scarf. 360 picks down, 3960 to go. I’m hoping to finish it next week, but since I am also studying two books on jacquard weaving and working on the book, not to mention pleasant katazome distractions, that may or may not happen.

And drawing? It has fallen by the wayside – well, with some assistance, that is. I had forgotten how things work in this house. As soon as I cleared enough space and started to draw, the inevitable happened:

Fritz helping me draw
Fritz helping me draw

I really would like to learn to draw, though, and I still have nine days left, so perhaps I’ll just trundle on outside and do my lessons there.

 

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, surface design Tagged With: katazome

March 30, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Katazome play day

I’ve spent the last two and a half days working with katazome, the Japanese art of stenciled paste-resist dyeing. Friday I cooked up the paste, a mix of glutinous rice flour and powdered rice bran. Saturday, my friend Alfred and I pasted up some pieces – Alfred dipped his in an indigo vat, and I hand-painted some of mine. Here are “before” and “after” shots of my work:

hand-painted katazome horse, before rinsing out the paste
hand-painted katazome horse, before rinsing out the paste
hand-painted katazome horse, after rinsing
hand-painted katazome horse, after rinsing
hand-painted katazome dragon, before rinsing out the paste
hand-painted katazome dragon, before rinsing out the paste
hand-painted katazome dragon, after rinsing out the paste
hand-painted katazome dragon, after rinsing out the paste
katazome goldfish - before rinsing out the paste
katazome goldfish – before rinsing out the paste

 

handpainted katazome goldfish - finished
handpainted katazome goldfish – finished

And here are some of the indigo-dyed versions:

katazome dragon, dipped in indigo
katazome dragon, dipped in indigo
katazome squirrel, dipped in indigo
katazome squirrel, dipped in indigo
katazome seashells, dipped in indigo
katazome seashells, dipped in indigo

Saturday, Alfred and I also completed quite a few new stencils – applying paint and netting to one side, removing the excess paint, and drying them flat. I used those stencils yesterday, producing a ton of half-finished pieces. Here are two of them:

katazome peacock
katazome peacock
katazome dragon with Celtic knot border
katazome dragon with Celtic knot border

These will come out better than the first batch, I think, as I did them more “properly” than the first batch. Instead of painting onto untreated cloth pinned to a plastic background, I pre-sized the cloth with soy milk (which helps prevent bleeding) and stretched them out by pinning them to screen printing frames. Here’s a pic of the whole shebang:

katazome phoenixes, stretched out on screen printing frame
katazome phoenixes, stretched out on screen printing frame

The Japanese way to do it is to use harite (clamps) on either end of the fabric, then put shinshi (bent pieces of bamboo with a pin on either end) into the selvages. The whole collection is then suspended from two pillars, holding the fabric nice and taut, perfect for painting. However, while I had shinshi, I didn’t have harite, or pillars to suspend the whole affair from – and in any case, for pieces so small it would have been serious overkill. So I used what I had lying around.

I can’t wait to see how the new batch came out. None of the pieces are perfect – there are drips of paste and places where a repeating stencil didn’t come out right – but since they are mostly just samples, that doesn’t matter much. I learned a lot while doing them, which is the important part!

Today I might paste up a few more pieces of cloth, but will probably dip them in an indigo vat rather than do elaborate painting. I have only two more weeks of recovery before I have to go back to work, and as katazome isn’t one of my main interests, I don’t want to “waste” too much of my precious time on it. But it sure has been fun to play with, and I love the results!

And the cats? Fritz was delighted to see my friend Alfred on Saturday, as Alfred has big feet – big enough to stick your entire head into, if you’re a shoe-fetishist cat. Here is a video of an ecstatic Fritz, caught in flagrante delicto with one of Alfred’s shoes.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, surface design Tagged With: katazome

March 24, 2015 by Tien Chiu

A quicker way of carving stencils

Things have been moving so fast the last two days, it’s hard to know where to start!

I’ve decided to have a play day on Saturday, doing more katazome with my friend Alfred. I thought it would be interesting to carve more stencils, but wasn’t looking forward to spending hours hunched over a cutting mat. Fortunately, there was an alternative…I broke out a Silhouette Cameo cutting machine (meant for scrapbooking) that I had bought a month or two ago, and tried using it to cut the katazome stencil paper. It is amazing. I tried cutting some very delicate and detailed stencils with it, and it performed with flying colors. Here are some photos of the stencils I made yesterday (click for the bigger photo):

katazome stencils - fish and peacock
katazome stencils – fish and peacock
katazome stencil of flying birds
katazome stencil of flying birds

I am particularly impressed by the bottom one, the two flying phoenixes. The faint lines are actually rows of dots almost too tiny to see, maybe 1/32″ in diameter. The cutter cut them out perfectly. There are a number of defects in the design, but they are Adobe Illustrator file errors – the cutting is absolutely perfect. I can’t wait to develop and cut my own stencil designs.

I’m continuing work on the second qiviut scarf – I wove about a foot on it today. I’m being careful because I’m having a (very mild) physical relapse, with some swelling and barely detectable bleeding. I understand now why my primary physician was adamant about not going back to work too soon! I have full mental energy, thankfully, but my body is definitely still healing. And I’m taking lots of naps, which should help speed up the recovery.

I’ve just about finished the book on Adobe Illustrator, and feel much more comfortable with the tool now. Unfortunately, I still can’t draw, which is hampering my efforts at design. So I’ve decided to fix that. I am going to spend the next fifteen days working through Claire Watson Garcia’s Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, one chapter a day. That will hopefully get me the fundamentals; after that, it’s a matter of practice. I probably won’t have time to make a habit of it, but anything would be better than complete ignorance.

I’m continuing to work on the book – an hour a day for now, but soon ramping up to two or three. I’m also exploring Marian Stubenitsky’s book Echo and Iris, which is (roughly) about structures you can weave on an extended parallel threading. I spent half this afternoon concocting a monstrosity of a drawdown – a tied weave with an echo weave ground cloth. (Four echoes, on a divided parallel threading. Shafts 1-10 and 21-30 contained the ties, shafts 11-20 and 31-40 contained the pattern. The echo weave ground cloth, of course, was woven on all 40 shafts.) I did get it to work, structurally speaking, but the resulting draft wasn’t very attractive. No matter; it was a learning tool, and it worked. I have a better understanding of Photoshop design, tied weaves, and echo weave now.

It probably sounds as if I’m diving into way too many things, but I’m really enjoying exploring multiple areas at once. One of the secrets to my productivity is simply having a great variety of activities – there’s always something to suit my mental and physical energy level, whatever it may be. And being home all day allows me to devote my full mental power to exploring. I have three more weeks away from work while my body heals, and I plan to make the most of them. So much to do, so little time!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, surface design Tagged With: katazome

October 23, 2014 by Tien Chiu

The opening shot of chocolate season

112 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of cocoa
112 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of cocoa

…and could you ask for a better shot? Here are fifty-one kilograms (about a hundred and twelve pounds) of Valrhona white, milk, and dark chocolates, and another nine kilograms (about twenty pounds) of Valrhona cocoa. No girl could possibly ask for anything more.

This weekend I am starting my flavor trials. Here are the top few flavors on my list:

  • Kaffir lime, lemongrass, ginger, coconut milk caramels in dark chocolate
  • pear, sage, and honey fruit jelly, with sage-honey ganache (not sure dark, white, or milk), dipped in chocolate
  • Chocolate pistachio fudge
  • Pistachio ganache with kirsch
  • Pistachio/white chocolate gianduja and dark chocolate ganache
  • Walnut gianduja with cinnamon milk chocolate ganache

A couple of those flavor combinations come from my FAAAAAABULOUS new chocolate book:

Fine Chocolates 4 by Jean-Pierre Wybauw
Fine Chocolates 4 by Jean-Pierre Wybauw

Jean-Pierre Wybauw is one of the foremost experts on chocolatiering, and this is his fourth book. Each of his books is a wonderful combination of theory and practice: it starts by explaining the theory of how everything works and then provides a mouthwatering set of recipes. The first three books in the series plus Peter Greweling’s Chocolates and Confections are my chocolatiering bibles. And now – just in time for chocolate season – a new one!

I haven’t yet had time to devour the book completely, but I did page through the enticing food porn, I mean chocolate recipes, and pull out some interesting flavor combinations. Some of them, like peach fruit jelly and vanilla ganache, are classics that I just hadn’t thought to try yet; others, like raspberry-coriander, sound really intriguing; and others, like caraway-lavender, I can’t visualize at all. Which means I really have to try them!

I have also just finished writing up five pages detailing the things I learned about katazome while studying with John Marshall. I wanted to write down absolutely everything I could remember before I forgot it all – and, while I’m writing it, why not share it with the world? So, with John’s permission, I wrote four pages covering carving stencils, making katazome paste, stenciling the paste, and applying pigments + soy milk. There is also a fifth page that provides links to the first four.

This was no small task – those five pages are over four thousand words, plus photos and video! But I thought it was important to capture what I learned. I’m strongly drawn to katazome, and will likely return to it at some point, integrating it with my weaving somehow.

Here’s a pic of a katazome tiger that John did as a demo during class, and which I rinsed out yesterday – gorgeous!

Finished katazome tiger
Finished katazome tiger

Meanwhile, the book was on temporary hold while I wrote up the katazome stuff, but I’m back on it now. I’ve written the first seven hundred fifty words of my first prototype chapter, so I’m about a quarter done. Hoping to make more progress in the next several mornings, now that the katazome dissertation is complete!

Finally, we have made a shocking discovery: Fritz has become a hardened criminal! It all started with Mike’s socks. They were migrating. We’d come home and find a scattering of socks all over the house. Since Mike wasn’t doing it, and I wasn’t doing it, that left only two possibilities. Naturally, Fritz came under suspicion, given his previous history of drug abuse (you may recall that he loves sniffing shoes), but as Tigress also is quite playful, we weren’t quite sure. Until this morning. Mike woke up around seven o’clock to the sound of a cat pawing at something. He opened his eyes, and there was Fritz, digging in Mike’s clean laundry basket! Eventually Fritz found a sock, and made off with it. Mystery solved!

(But I knew deep down inside that all this shoe-sniffing would lead to a life of crime…we should have sent him off to rehab while there was still time!)

Here are a few photos of the culprit in action. Unfortunately, I was laughing way too hard to take a video…

Fritz digging for socks
Fritz digging for socks
Fritz finds a sock!
Fritz finds a sock!
Fritz stealing a sock
Fritz stealing a sock

Filed Under: All blog posts, food, chocolate, textiles, surface design Tagged With: katazome

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