taquete | Tien Chiu's Blog

September 26, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Butterfly samples, and sample notebooks

I started sampling for the butterfly shawl today, trying out two background wefts:

1st samples of handwoven butterfly patterns in taquete

This is the “painted lady” butterfly, set on the diagonal.

I originally used a dark olive cashmere weft, thinking that the dullness of the color and the matte surface of the cashmere would set the butterflies off nicely. But it turned out to be too close in value to the black – you can see how it dulls down the color, too. So I tried a bright gold background weft, and that worked a little better, but I worry about how well it will work with a blue morpho butterfly, or a yellow tiger swallowtail – or a luna moth (pale green), for that matter. I am going to try a white background weft next – I think it will probably wash out the color, but I want to see it in action.

I have also completed a horizontally symmetric monarch butterfly:

horizontally symmetric monarch butterfly pattern for taquete

I have yet to weave this one up – will do that as soon as I get the background settled.

I am leaning towards a somewhat light-colored background right now, because the outlines of most butterflies are medium to dark. Put against a black background, they will blur and disappear. A lighter background would provide more contrast and hence make them more visible.

What next? I need to test the background with a wide range of colors, so I will abandon the orange-and-black butterflies for now. Over the next week or so, I plan to plot out a blue morpho butterfly, a luna moth, and a yellow swallowtail butterfly – possibly also a cecropia moth. Between those four and the monarch butterfly, they cover most color combinations of butterflies – yellow, blue, green, tan, and orange. (Isn’t it interesting that there are very few red or purple butterflies?) So it is looking like it will be awhile before I can launch into the actual shawl.

Meanwhile, I have decided to “get serious” about keeping notes. I have a bunch of undocumented samples running around, and after much consideration I have decided that I will NEVER get around to keeping a physical notebook of samples, complete with the drafts, notes, etc. associated with each sample. It’s simply too much of a pain to collect, print, etc. all that information. It’s also inefficient. With some of my treadling repeats 2000 picks long, it will be functionally impossible to reproduce the sample from the printed draft, anyway.

So what to do? OneNote to the rescue!

Here is the electronic “notebook” I am keeping for my samples, using Microsoft OneNote (click for the full-sized version):

As you can see from the top tab, this is the Projects portion in my Weaving notebook, in the Butterflies section. This section contains two top-level pages and three subpages (see tabs at right). There’s a Concept page (not shown) that talks about what I am trying to achieve with this project, and it’s got a Samples subpage where I’m sticking all the photos of the samples. Then there’s a Butterflies page that lists all the species of butterfly I’m trying to weave up. It has subpages for each butterfly motif I’m weaving.

Pictured on the page is the “Monarch diagonal” subpage. You can see the original photo, and the screenshot of the mini version. More importantly, there are three files on the page: the draft, and the two Photoshop files used to create the drafts. (One is of the image, and the other is the image modified into a weavable liftplan.) These are the original files! OneNote lets you embed copies of files into your notebook, so they are preserved and instantly accessible from the notebook. So I have all the working files and all the information about this project neatly filed away in OneNote.

About the only thing OneNote will not do is handle physical samples. I plan to put photos into OneNote, and attach a tag to each sample that references the corresponding OneNote workbook section. I think that should cover things pretty nicely, and store the important data – the electronic bits – very neatly and accessibly.

September 25, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Butterflies

I’ve started collecting butterflies for my butterfly shawl. This is a slow and laborious process wherein I search for butterfly photos on the Internet, find a couple that show the markings clearly, and use them to draw the butterfly, pixel by pixel, in Photoshop. So far I’ve done a painted lady and a monarch butterfly, both drawn on the diagonal:

Not bad, considering the limited number of pixels I’m working with (max of 18 wide for the diagonal butterflies, 40 wide for the vertically symmetric ones). I will probably do a second of the monarch, this one vertically symmetrical and larger, because it’s a big and very recognizable butterfly that would benefit from a little more detail.

The one problem I foresee is that I may run out of big, clearly recognizable butterflies. How many can you name? A couple types of swallowtails, monarch, painted lady, the luna moth of course, and the blue morpho are the ones which pop into my mind. This is not enough to do a 78″ shawl (my usual length), so I’m going to have to do some searching to find other showy butterflies/moths. I may also do some caterpillars! Some caterpillars are quite bright, and it would add a whimsical touch to the shawl. And despite its name as a pest, the sphinx moth is really pretty during its larval stage. (It’s also known as the tomato hornworm – a striking, HUGE green and white caterpillar which will, unfortunately, also chow rapidly through your tomato plants.)

Anyway, this is apt to be a long project, as it takes about half an hour to an hour to convert an individual butterfly, and the diagonal butterflies will wind up only about an inch long when woven. The big, vertically symmetric butterflies will be bigger – maybe two inches – but I expect it will take about 50-60 butterflies and caterpillars to finish out the shawl. I would really like to weave a shawl with no repeats, because I think it would be neat, but if I start getting bored (or run out of butterfly types) I might just make the shawl symmetrical, in which case it would only take about 25-30 butterflies.

At any rate, I plan to convert these files to five-shuttle taquete weaves and try weaving them up as samples. When it comes to the shawl, I’m just going to “wing it” without weaving a test of the design, because each of the butterflies are different. (You could call the entire shawl a butterfly sampler!) I expect it will probably take about 2 months to design and weave the butterfly shawl (especially since about half my free time is currently devoted to drawing exercises), so this will be a slow project – but worth it, I hope!

September 5, 2010 by Tien Chiu

…and a touch of glitz

I liked the peacock feather from yesterday, but it seemed a little drab. After all, peacocks are brilliantly colored, are they not? So I got out one of the pirns of fine gold thread left over from the wedding-coat fabric, and wove two more feathers. And here, in full, is the evolution of the peacock feather design:

The evolution of the handwoven peacock feather design

You can see that it starts out blobby (a little like a Dr. Seuss green space alien, if Dr. Seuss had created anything like that), then the feathery bits appear, and by the time you get to the fourth one down the basic design is in place. After that I changed out some of the colors (when my embroidery thread arrived), and finally the last two have glitter.

Here is a photo of the 4 most recent iterations:

Final four handwoven peacock-feather samples, showing the evolution in wefts

I went back and forth for awhile on whether I thought the glitz was pretty or just gaudy, but after seeing it in many different types of lighting, I like the glitz a lot. And the thread, being very fine, only stiffens the “hand” a little bit, still well within the parameters for a shawl.

Oh, and here’s the back side:

wrong side of handwoven taquete peacock feathers

Lillian was right: it will need to be lined.

I have now gotten the Cibacron F “pure” color samples back from Ginny, which means I can now get started on dyeing the Cibacron F color wheel. However, I am still working on the Lanaset color wheel and the Lanaset color reproduction, not to mention making 10 fruitcakes this weekend, so I am not quite sure what I will tackle next. Cibacron F may have to wait for during the week, though I’d hate to defer it. Dawn is coming later and later, making it harder and harder to get a complete dyebath in before work. And Cibacron F takes half an hour longer than Lanaset! so I may try to get some Cibacron F in this weekend, and save the Lanaset for working during the week. I know from experience that I can get a Lanaset dyebath done in the mornings.

Anyway, I have selected the color I want to try matching. It is Colourmart 60/2 silk, color “camel”, 2.5Y 7/3 in the Munsell system, and looks kinda like this (usual caveats about monitor colors, etc. being “off”):

color to duplicate for Munsell dye study group

I have dyed the first four test samples and will be looking at them later today or early tomorrow.

September 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Woven peacock feathers, 3rd sample

Finished weaving up the sample this morning:

3rd version of handwoven peacock feather design

The top row of peacock feathers is the previous design, the bottom row is the new design.

Changes:

Eliminated the areas of blended black and green around the outer edges of the feather
Replaced the dark green weft with a bright emerald green weft
Lengthened the shaft of the feather so it blended nicely with the end of the previous feather

Thoughts:

The new feather seems a lot fuller than the previous feather, because I eliminated the blended black and green areas, but I may add them back – it “feels” maybe a little TOO bold, could use some toning down. Interesting since I really didn’t think the blended black and green sections were visibly different, but it does make a difference!
I like the longer feather shaft, the feather now feels complete instead of being crammed in with the next feather.
Bright emerald green weft works better than the darker green weft. The pattern shows more clearly.

I will add back the areas of blended green and black and weave up another feather or two, and see if I like that better. (The threads for the full shawl have not yet arrived, so I can’t start weaving the “real thing” yet!)

September 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Statistics

Alice’s comment (on her blog) that she had recently reached her 1,000th blog post got me curious about mine. So I looked in my Dashboard, and discovered that I had just passed 1,500! But then, I have been blogging nearly eight years, since October 8, 2002. On that fateful day, I left home and started my 6-month trek through Southeast Asia, blogging as I went.

Then I took a look at Google Analytics, which I set up around the same time I migrated my website. To my surprise, in just 11 months, I’ve had 34,485 visitors from 164 countries, and served up over 134,707 pages. At this rate, I should have nearly 150,000 “hits” this year! That was a huge surprise.

Anyway, I did some fiddling and added the NeoCounter widget that Sandra Rude has on her blog, so now you, too, can see where people are coming from.

Creatively speaking, I’ve been booked in the evenings, so not much has happened except a little bit of fiddling with the peacock-feather draft. I lengthened the end of the feather so there’s not as much overlap, and I think it looks much nicer now:

In the old version there was a blobby bit, a solid green area that ran between the feathers and obscured the feathery bits at the top of each feather. So I lengthened the shaft of the feather and made it narrower, to the point where the shaft blended neatly with the top of the next feather.

Today I plan to test-weave the revised version of the feather pattern. Saturday the actual threads I’m using should arrive, and then I’ll do one more test-weave (to see if I like the colors), and then launch into the actual shawl.