tied weaves | Tien Chiu's Blog

September 18, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Phoenix profile draft

I spent some time tinkering this morning and came up with the following profile draft:

profile draft for phoenix

It still needs considerable work (the profile draft is on 24 shafts so I need to respace/resize it for 22 in order to weave it as a tied weave) but I really like the image – it’s obviously a bird and the spread-out tail suggests flight. Put it against a flame-colored background and you have a phoenix rising from the ashes.

The plan is as follows:

Finish profile draft and convert to a turned double two tie weave structure.
Wind two 12″ warps, one for the 60/2 pattern warp and one for the 140/2 tabby warp.
Paint the 140/2 silk warp in orange and red. Rinse out and beam on.
Paint 60/2 pattern warp in shades of yellow and gold and toss over trapeze (in lieu of second beam).
Thread, sley, and tie on.
Dye 140/2 silk weft skein in shades of orange and red.
Weave fabric. Phoenixes should appear yellow/gold against orange/ red.

There is quite a bit of uncertainty in this piece, since I’ve never woven a turned tied weave before, and weaving with 140/2 silk has so far eluded me (lots of broken threads), so I expect lots of snags. Still, that’s the plan. It will be neat to see the sample!

First, however, I have to write a few more sections of the book. I didn’t write anything while I was at Seminars, so I have less than a week of posts queued. So I’ll spend some time working on that this week as well. (Not to mention catching up from a week away!)

Speaking of the book, the latest post is up – this one on what to do if you’re missing some skills that you need for a piece. (Very apropos, since I’m missing quite a few skills for this sample, but intend to do it anyway!)

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 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.