Tien Chiu

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March 29, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Cross-dyeing magic, part I

I have now completed the first round of dyeing (fiber-reactive).  It was magical.  I started with fabric that was nearly white, like this:

undyed fabric
undyed fabric

…and when I dyed it, like magic, a rich, beautiful pattern appeared!

fiber-reactive dye swatch, scrunch-dyed in brown and black
fiber-reactive dye swatch, scrunch-dyed in brown and black

Here are a few more swatches:

fiber-reactive dyes: scrunch-dyed in turquoise and purple
fiber-reactive dyes: scrunch-dyed in turquoise and purple
fiber reactive dye: arashi shibori
fiber reactive dye: arashi shibori
fiber-reactive dye: stenciled maple leaf
fiber-reactive dye: stenciled maple leaf

(Yes, you are reading “Hello World” in that swatch.  What can I say, I’m a geek!)

Keep in mind that these are only half the story.  I will be overdyeing with acid dyes later this week, to dye the other half of the fabric – and am eager to see what happens!

Meanwhile, in shibori workshop-land, I have completed some more samples of stitched shibori:

stitched shibori triangles
stitched shibori triangles
stitched shibori, orange circles, stitched on fold
stitched shibori, orange circles, stitched on fold
stitched shibori, mokume style, stitched on bias
stitched shibori, mokume style, stitched on bias
stitched shibori, wavy lines
stitched shibori, wavy lines

The fabric in the stitched shibori, by the way, is more of the alpaca/tencel fabric, this time dyed in rust brown and gold, which “averages out” to a rust orange.  However, the fabric has more depth and variation than a single-fiber fabric…perhaps not obvious in the photo, but pretty neat in person.

This week will be a fairly quiet week, as the cotton-wrapped polyester thread I ordered (from Atlanta Thread) will take several days to arrive.  I plan to finish the acid dyeing, which will take a few days, and take some quiet time, cleaning up the studio and maybe reading a few of those books I have piled up!

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: cross dyeing, shibori

March 18, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Mokume shibori

I’m doing a five-week workshop on shibori, and have finally gotten caught up to the current lesson, which is on stitched shibori.  So far all I’ve done is mokume shibori, which is parallel lines of stitching.  Why so much time on one technique?  Because all woven shibori is variants on mokume shibori!  So doing a small number of exercises in hand-stitched mokume shibori will teach me the principles of woven shibori.   Then I can take those concepts back to the loom and work on bigger pieces in woven shibori, confident in my designs.

Here are some of my before-and-after photos:

Long stitches, spaced identically
Long stitches, spaced identically. The fabric is pulled up into parallel (and quite boring) pleats; furthermore, the compression is so good that very little dye gets into the fabric.
mokume shibori - long stitches, staggered
mokume shibori - long stitches, spaced in parallel rows 1" apart and staggered so the stitches lie precisely opposite each other. Notice the complex texturing and the diagonal lines!
mokume shibori - long stitches vs. short stitches
mokume shibori - long stitches (outer rectangle) vs. short stitches (inner rectangle).
A heart, in mokume shibori
mokume shibori heart - long stitches on outside, floats on outside heart, small stitches in inner heart.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how woven shibori works just from these few exercises, and will continue stitching samplers until I understand the principles of mokume shibori a little better.  Then it will be back to the loom!

Meanwhile, Kodachrome is completed except for the snaps (which need to be sewn down firmly) and the lining, which needs to be re-hemmed.  For some reason, the lining is too short near the center back, so I’ll need to redo the hem, dropping it by about 3/4″.  Fortunately I have enough length that I can do this!  After that, all that will be left is sewing in the label.

Sunday is the photo shoot, and it should be fun!  A friend is coming over to help me do my hair, and I have a makeup artist coming over to “do me up” for the shoot.  First she’s going to do “the natural look” (that’s for Handwoven) and then she’s going to do a much more theatrical look (that’s for HGA/Convergence, if it doesn’t get published in Handwoven).  I’m rather looking forward to the theatrical look – I have, as you know, a penchant for body paint, and I think it would be really cool to have my face painted up with rainbow colors.  Sort of like body paint, only slightly more localized.  🙂

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: shibori, woven shibori

October 8, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Woven shibori

It’s been an exhausting five days, with 7+ hours of meetings every day, followed by lengthy (until 1-2am)  evening social events with our CEO and German coworkers.  Between the full schedule and jet lag, I didn’t get much sleep, so when I finally got home last night, I collapsed into bed and slept the sleep of the thoroughly exhausted.

(In case you’re wondering what I do for a living, by the way, my background/experience is in software project management, but I’m mostly doing business process re-engineering for my current company.  Basically I analyze what people in a particular division are doing, what tools they use, etc. and identify areas where we can make things more efficient, easier, and/or better.  I also act as an unofficial ombudsman, taking people’s suggestions, concerns, and complaints, anonymizing them, and informing the executive team of anything that appears to be a systemic problem.  It’s a really interesting position, since it means that I get to poke my nose into what every division is doing, and solve a diverse array of problems.  One month I’ll be looking at customer service, the next month I’ll be solving some problems in marketing, or establishing a new analyst position.  For a generalist like me, who is good at solving complicated, poorly-defined problems and hates being boxed in,  it’s an ideal position.  It’s also unusually far-sighted of the executive team to have someone in this position, as the company, while growing rapidly, is only about 200 people.  Usually you don’t see someone in my role until the company grows considerably larger.)

Anyway, for obvious reasons, not much art got done amidst all the work and partying, but I learned a lot and had fun meeting everyone at the German office.  I also spent a little bit of my free time reading up on shibori techniques and the different dyes I could use with shibori.

What is shibori, you ask?  Shibori is tied-resist dyeing, which mostly comes in two forms: wrapping the fabric tightly with thread or string, or sewing a line or lines through the fabric and pulling the thread tight.  Then the fabric is dyed.  The dye can’t penetrate to the tied/sewn areas, so those portions remain their original color, producing a pattern controlled by the dyer.  (Karren Brito has written an excellent book, Shibori, that covers some shibori techniques and also has excellent technical information on fiber-reactive and acid dyes.  She details how she makes her scarves, which are mostly arashi shibori, here.)

The main drawback to some forms of shibori, especially stitched shibori, is that they are quite slow: after all, sewing takes time, and if you are trying to cover a large area it can take quite awhile to finish even a relatively small piece.

Enter woven shibori!  Woven shibori  speeds up the tying process by weaving the ties directly into the cloth, using a supplemental warp, weft, or both.  The supplementary warp/weft is not an integral part of the cloth; instead, it is pulled tight to create the resist, then clipped out and removed after the dyeing is complete.  (You can read more about the technique in Woven Shibori by Catharine Ellis.)  This allows creation of complex patterns, especially allover patterns, in far less time than it would take to sew them.

I  see several opportunities in woven shibori.  It offers me a way to merge the flowing, shaded work of dyeing with the rectangular grid of weaving, which is important to me since I feel these will form an important part of my artistic expression.  Because I can clip out ties before dyeing, I can form larger patterns by removing the ties in certain areas, helping me break out of the limitations of shaft looms.  And by playing with dyes, adding and discharging color, I can do some remarkably complex work.

Here are just a few of the possibilities/techniques/variables:

  • Discharging color from pre-dyed fabrics  to create complex color gradations
  • Using two sets of ties to dye in a double pattern (using the ties either simultaneously or one after another)
  • Using two different fibers and then dyeing with a dye that only affects one of them
  • Clipping out some of the ties, so I can make imagery in the fabric
  • Color and value in the piece
  • Dyeing different areas with different colors
  • Dyeing top and bottom of the tied fabric different colors
  • Choosing the weave structure/pattern of the base fabric to complement the patterns of dye.  (Most of  Ellis’s examples in her book involve plain weave background, and I can see why – complex structures tend to disappear – but the few examples she shows of more complex weaves are intriguing.)

I’m significantly more excited about the possibilities in woven shibori than I am about tied weaves (at least for the moment), so when I return home I think I will cut off the taquete I’ve woven and rethread the loom in a threading appropriate for tied shibori.  (Double two-tie threading with a 1:1 ratio turns out to be one of the few threadings that positively doesn’t work: the ties guarantee that there won’t be any long floats, and long floats are exactly what’s needed to create the folds of woven shibori.)  I do need to test the black warp first, though, to find out whether it will discharge and if so to what color.

Simultaneously with this, I think I will explore some “regular” shibori, using some lengths of commercial silk fabric from my stash.  It will give me an opportunity to learn about what can be done with shibori without laboriously hand-weaving fabrics, and if I stick to small pieces and the simpler forms of shibori, can probably be done fairly quickly.

How I’m going to fit that in with drawing, design, and possibly painting is not entirely clear, but I expect it will resolve itself in the usual way: things that I find boring fall by the wayside, things that interest me get more of my time and attention.

Meanwhile, chocolate season is coming, so I am starting to think about flavors…

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

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