Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / Archives for painted warp

May 5, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Painted warp samples

Sorry for the long silence! I’ve been prepping for a longish vacation – nine days visiting friends and family on the East Coast. Just finished four days visiting my best friend Edouard in New York City, and now en route to Maryland for another five days with family. I’ll return home Thursday.

Since I’ve had quite a bit of travel time, I’ve been spending some of it finishing up the painted warp samples for my upcoming talk at ANWG. The challenge was showing how warp and weft colors interact to produce the finished cloth – particularly when the colors aren’t solid, and I’m using multiple structures in the same swatch.

Fortunately, I always dye a few extra warp threads when painting a warp to make repairs easy, so I had a bundle of eight or nine leftover warp threads when I was done weaving. I tacked them down at the boundary between weave structures, and ran a bundle of weft threads across the swatch to show the weft colors. Like this:

painted warp swatch with a bundle of warp threads running vertically and a bundle of weft threads running horizontally
painted warp swatch

I think this shows off the warp and weft colors nicely, and the swatch shows how they weave up together, both in a complex design and in a simpler one.

This particular (8-shaft) draft blends colors quite a bit. I’m doing another set of samples that uses the same threading and the same colors, but a VERY different tie-up that keeps the warp and weft colors largely separate. It will produce a vastly different look. The point here is that people often focus on the color palette, when structure is just as important. The color palette determines what color blends are possible, but structure controls what color blends actually appear, and what blends appear in which area.

I wove a surprisingly large number of samples on this warp. It was a 14-yard warp, and I got 32 samples out of it. I’ll be doing another 32 samples in an identical color palette using the other structure, which – added to the 20-odd samples that Laura Fry already wove for me – will give me about 80-90 painted warp samples for my seminar. I plan to weave another 50-60 for the online course I’m developing, but not until I get back from ANWG.

Here (purely for the eye candy) are a few more painted warp samples:

painted warp swatch in pinks and purples
painted warp swatch with dark blue mottled warp and pale pink weft
mottled blue painted warp with pale blue weft

The last two swatches demonstrate the interplay/trade-off between woven pattern and dyed pattern. In the blue swatch with pale pink weft, the high contrast between warp and weft makes the woven pattern quite prominent. So you don’t see much of the pattern dyed into the warp; it becomes a textural background to the pattern woven into the cloth.

In the blue swatch with the lighter blue warp, the warp and weft have much less contrast, so the pattern dyed into the warp is much clearer. But you can still see structural effects. The dyed pattern is much clearer in areas where the woven pattern is simplest. At top right, the simple zigzag makes it easier to appreciate the mottled blue dye job than at bottom left, where the diamonds push the blue mottling into the background as a textural effect. Neither effect is wrong – just different. Knowing how your design decisions play out in the finished cloth makes you a more effective designer.

I’ve been having a lot of fun looking at and analyzing my samples. Not just pretty cloth – informative experiments! Art science at its best. 🙂

More details and registration for my ANWG seminar on the conference website:
http://www.anwgconference2019.com/

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: painted warp

March 9, 2019 by Tien Chiu

Science, hypothesis testing, and painted warp samples

I’m teaching two classes in June, at ANWG – a workshop on color mixing and a seminar on how to choose colors and weave structures for painted warps. (You can register for either of them here. Friday’s morning’s talk on painted warps is already full, but last I heard there were still spaces in the workshop and in the afternoon seminar.)

Since I’ve been too foggy-headed to do much work on Color Study #5 for the workshop, and I need to create some more examples for the painted warp seminar, I’ve been brainstorming painted warp samples instead.

I already have one set of samples, which Laura Fry wove for me, and which are winging their way to me as I write. They are woven on a warp that I had previously dyed in rainbow colors, in a variety of structures and with carefully chosen weft colors, and are lovely:

first set of painted warp samples, woven by Laura Fry
first set of painted warp samples

However, since I didn’t plan out the warp colors in advance, they don’t fully demonstrate the principles that I want to illustrate. So a second set of samples will be needed.

There are two approaches to sampling. The first is the exhaustive, information-gathering approach. This is where you have no hypothesis and are trying to develop one by gathering data, so you try every possible combination and then develop a theory to fit the data. (Cue 1,500 dye samples.) This is incredibly labor-intensive, but sometimes it’s got to be done.

I had originally planned to take this approach to painted warp sampling, because I didn’t have a solid theoretical basis for color. I thought up all the color and weave structure combinations that I thought would be useful to try, and came up with about 1,500 of them. Clearly this was not going to fly.

Fortunately, after another year and a half of study, plus teaching the first half of the Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course (it’s amazing how much more you learn through teaching), I now have a solid understanding of how color works in weaving. Very solid. I won’t claim to understand everything about color (nobody ever understands everything about anything), but at this point I think I understand enough about color in weaving to solve almost all the common color problems in weaving, or explain why the problem isn’t resolvable. (As in physics, no matter how much you know, you still can’t do the impossible.)

Since I now know more, I can take the other approach to sampling, which is testing a hypothesis. This is where you say “I think X will happen if I do Y, and will do a sample to see if this is true.”

So now I’m formulating samples to demonstrate known principles, rather than doing samples in order to figure out the principles.

Suddenly, I’ve gone from 1,500 samples to 44. Whew!!

Here are some of the principles I’m planning to demonstrate:

  • Warps with a wide range of values (i.e., that contain light, medium, and dark values) will make pattern appear/disappear in areas, no matter what weft is chosen.
  • Warps with a narrower range of values (i.e. all light, all medium, all dark, or combinations of any two) can be made to have bold or subtle pattern depending on choice of weft colors and weave structure.
  • Warps made with colors that fall between two primaries (primaries here are cyan (turquoise), magenta, and yellow) will allow you to choose a weft that preserves the bright colors while blending with everything else – warps that don’t, will blend into duller colors if woven in a structure that blends colors.
  • If your colors blend into dull colors, choosing a weave structure that separates warp and weft colors as much as possible (by creating warp dominant and weft dominant areas but not 50-50 mixes) will allow you to preserve the bright colors in your painted warp.
  • To show off painted warps, use a weft that is the same darkness or darker – a lighter weft will tend to draw attention to itself, pushing the painted warp into the background.

The ANWG seminar will likely form the nucleus for an online course about weaving with painted warps. It probably won’t be released for awhile yet, though – I’m planning to revamp my Color Courage for Weavers online course offerings and the painted warp course will definitely have to wait until after that work is done.

I’ve chosen the colors for the samples and am currently debating drafts. The simplest choice would be a plain twill plus twill blocks, which would probably resonate with students who prefer simpler structures. The twill would demonstrate what happens when you pick a structure that blends colors, and the twill blocks would demonstrate what happens when you mix colors. Simple and neat.

However, I’ve woven miles of twill and twill blocks for my other samples, and I’m desperately bored of both structures. I also want to demonstrate that you can weave sexier structures than those. So I’m thinking of using these two drafts, which I was using to demonstrate optical mixing and simultaneous contrast in my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course a few weeks ago.

Here’s the first draft, from Handweaving.net (contributed by an anonymous visitor). It demonstrates what happens when you blend colors:

Handweaving.net draft #45549, contributed by an anonymous visitor

And here is the same draft with a different tie-up, demonstrating keeping colors separate:

The same draft, but with a bolder twill tie-up

Kathy Fennell (one of the course participants) wove up both drafts, and they look quite nice in real life. They need very different setts, of course, but they look good enough that I think they would work to demonstrate the principles. And it’s a nice touch that they are the same design, except that one is subtle and the other bold.

The only thing I worry about is that they will look too complex and will intimidate some students. And 44 samples in that one weave structure is a LOT! Perhaps I will rethread to something different, halfway through.

Meanwhile, the cold is starting to improve, so I’ll be back at work on Color Study 5 for Color Courage for Weavers – Workshop later today.

Color Study 5 is about visual complexity/busy-ness, which is basically how much effort it takes for the brain to take in/process a piece. It’s a juicy topic, and I’m starting with an explanation of how the brain processes an image – any image. Which, in turn, starts with some observations about what our visual system evolved to do. It’s really cool stuff.

For example, our eyes are irresistibly attracted to areas of high contrast, particularly light/dark contrast. Our eyes go to areas of high contrast first, and as designers we need to be aware of that/take advantage of that in when designing, to focus the eye where we want it. But why is that? It’s because the eye is physically built for edge detection, finding and signaling edges before data even goes to the brain. The stronger the contrast, the louder the signal. That’s because early detection of edges helps the brain distinguish pattern from ground (objects from background) faster. And that, in turn, enables us to detect food and predators faster and more efficiently.

There are other factors related to our evolution that affect how we view an object, and how the brain processes what we see. That, in turn, influences how we need to design.

Do my students need to know all that information about human evolution before they can design effectively? Technically, no. I could just list off the important factors and tell them to design using those factors. But I believe that giving them the why is important, because it enables them to do more than memorize – it enables them to think for themselves, to reason about other factors that I may not be giving them. For example, if they encounter a diagonal line, they might say, “Aha! And how would the primitive brain react to diagonal lines in nature? What diagonal lines might it encounter?” and get insight from that.

When I was sixteen, I went to a summer program that taught the process of mathematics – not just facts, but the intellectual explorations involved in doing mathematical research. The motto of the program was “Think deeply of simple things.”

And that’s how I approach teaching – not just what, but also why.

Filed Under: Warp & Weave, All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: painted warp

June 20, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Site outage and temples

You may have noticed that the site was down for most of yesterday, the result of a botched DNS update.  I’ve corrected things and everything should be OK now, but please let me know if anything else looks wonky.

Despite a trying day yesterday, I did manage to get some things done this weekend:

  • threaded, sleyed, and tied on the painted warp
  • wove a short header, and am currently debugging the painted warp
  • set up my new copy stand for photographing/”scanning” the magazines

I also experimented with a wooden temple.  Up until now, I’ve been using paperclip temples, but someone suggested that a wooden temple works better.  So I bought one and am using it on my warp, like so:

trying out the wooden temple
trying out the wooden temple

Thus far I think I like the paperclip temples better – the wooden temple is trickier to place and blocks my view of the fabric – but I am persevering, because these things often get  better with practice, and I think it probably does do a better job of holding the fabric edges out to reduce draw-in.

I am also pleased to say that the registration marks seem to be working out nicely.  Here is the warp on the loom:

registration marks on warp
registration marks on warp

Right now they are nicely lined up, and so is the warp.  We’ll see what it looks like after some more weaving – last time I had trouble with the bouts “taking up” at different rates.  I think I’ve fixed that problem, but only a test run will say for sure.  Fortunately, I had the foresight to leave plenty of warp at the beginning for testing – nearly a yard of white warp that I can weave up as a test.

Plans for this week: do the sampling and take the various measurements necessary to create the knitted blank; knit up two blanks, one for each panel; start scanning the magazines.  I am deliberately not planning on doing much weaving, because someone is coming by on Saturday to see my loom (she is thinking of purchasing an AVL WDL).  I’m not sure what she will think of the Frankenloom that is currently set up (with the trapeze, live-weight tension, LED loom lighting, enlarged back beam, etc., mine is not exactly a factory-configured AVL), but she should be able to weave on it and get a feel for how the AVL WDL works and how it fits her body.  Which is at least 50% of what matters.

Anyway, because she is coming over, I don’t want to weave up the entire sampling section of the warp before she arrives – that way she can play to her heart’s delight without worrying about screwing up anything “real”.

And now, off to prep for work!  Today’s the first day of my new job, and it will be interesting to see what transpires.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: autumn splendor, painted warp

June 10, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Colors, colors

I finished the first sample panel:

Completed panel, first sample
Completed panel, first sample

My conclusions:

  • I do need to mingle the bouts near the edges, as some striping is evident where the bouts got out of sync.  This is most obvious in the left-hand side of the yellow section, but is also visible in the lower right of the red section.  It’s much more obvious in person.
  • I need to fix some tension issues.  The warp was much looser on the side bouts than in the center, resulting in much more take-up – about 4″ over the first 24″ – which meant the bouts got out of sync.  I have some ideas of what is wrong and will take steps to fix it in the next set of samples.
  • I need to make the transitions between colors more gradual in the knitted blank.  There’s some pretty pronounced striping where the color changes happened too fast.
  • I’m not sure I like the effect of switching to the silk.  The fabric is heavier (at 7000 ypp, it’s nearly 20% heavier than the tencel) and as a result, does not drape as well.  Shorter floats may contribute to the effect.
  • And – and this is the kicker – I don’t like the colors.  They’re too bright; they make me think of summer flowers, not autumn leaves.  Compare it to the original sample in tencel:

Tencel sample (original)
Tencel sample (original)

At this point I am not quite sure what to do next.  Do I continue on in silk, or switch back to tencel?  Do I try a sample in 60/2 silk (for a lighter fabric), using the old color set?  I am baffled by the options.  I am going to take a day or two to meditate on this, and meanwhile work on my Handwoven article.  But I have the feeling I will go back to the tencel, and weave (yet another) sample, in the original colors, this time at full width.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: autumn splendor, knitted blank, painted warp

June 9, 2011 by Tien Chiu

First panel

By working diligently (okay, obsessively 🙂 ), I have managed to get the first blank knitted, dyed, unraveled, and on the loom.  Here is a shot of the pirns – aren’t they pretty?

Pirns from a knitted blank
Pirns from a knitted blank

And here is the beginning of the weaving:

Painted warp, knitted blank
The weaving begins!

My only critique (so far) is that some of the color changes lo0k more abrupt than I’d like.  I will keep an eye on this as I weave it off, to see if I need to modify my painting technique for the next blank.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing, weaving Tagged With: autumn splendor, knitted blank, painted warp

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