velvet

February 19, 2024 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Fire in the rain

Well, the velvet attempt was a bit of a disaster. I’m still determined to weave velvet, but I’ve realized that debugging the process and solving all the problems is likely to take months. More on that in a future blog post. (I haven’t given up, just contemplating my next move.)

Since I would really like to have a finished project – any project! – someday, I’ve decided to warp up the left side of Grace. I was initially thinking about a black and white warp, which is what most people put onto a jacquard loom because of its versatility. However, black and white is booooooring. (I also almost never use white in my designs.) So I decided to create another “fire” warp instead.

Here’s the one I cut off Maryam when I sold her:

warp dyed in many shades of orange, yellow, and red

It’s a mix of different fibers and yarn sizes. Here’s how that warp looked, before dyeing:

warp prior to dyeing, showing the different types of yarn in the warp

I think that warp was a mix of mercerized cotton, silk, and unmercerized cotton. The fibers took the dye differently, producing the gorgeous variegation shown above.

This new warp is a different mix. It’s one strand of 10/2 tencel, one strand of mercerized 10/2 cotton, one strand of a 4/28 nm cabled silk, and one strand of 20/2 silk. They should absorb dyes differently, and also reflect light differently – some are very lustrous, others are not. It should be interesting!

Here’s the warp halfway through winding:

partially wound warp on a large warping mill

I wound the entire 29″ warp in a single bout. I know you’re not supposed to do this, but with painted warps, winding multiple bouts usually results in abrupt color shifts in the middle of the warp. There are ways to make that less noticeable, but for me, it’s easier just to wind a super-wide warp, dye it, and then separate it out into smaller sections when warping.

(I can get away with winding a very wide warp because I’ve got a large warping mill. I think this approach would not work nearly as well on a warping board.)

Now to the rain part. It’s been pouring about half the time, which is fantastic because this is California and we (always) desperately need rain. But my dye studio is on the patio, and, well, it’s raining for the next four days. (Hurray! Boo! Hurray!)

Fortunately, we have a table that sits under an underhang, and stays dry. So I sneaked out during a lull in the rain and did a little dyeing:

It looks like a solid color in the photo, but once it’s rinsed and dried, it should be all shades of fire. (Crossing fingers that this actually happens – dyeing always entails some randomness.)

I used 1.75 gallons (really!) of golden yellow to start, pouring it over the warp and squishing to soak the entire warp in yellow. (I really didn’t want white spots.) Then I drizzled 2 quarts of orange and red-orange over it, flipped it over, and squirted more orange/red on the yellow spots. My goal was a mostly orange warp with some areas of red-orange and a few areas of gold.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll start rinsing out the warp. I think it will work great for my AI-generated tiger, so I’m going to spend the next week or two working a bit more on the design. In particular, I want to think about how I want to render the circuitry – whether to weave it in metallic yarns, embroider it, couch real circuit boards down, or (this sounds exciting) use the retro-reflective yarns I bought ages ago to create brilliantly reflective areas.

(Retro-reflective yarn, in case you’re wondering, is a plastic yarn that’s been coated with the same glass beads that are used for high-visibility/reflective clothing. It looks flat gray until you shine a light directly at it, at which point it turns brilliantly white with reflected light.)

In case you’d forgotten, here’s the tiger I plan to weave:

The left part of the tiger will use the Fire warp, and the right side will use mostly the black warp, I think.

Can’t wait to see how this all turns out!

February 11, 2024 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Velvet rabbit

The last few months I’ve felt excruciatingly snail-like in my progress towards weaving velvet. I’m glad to say that I am now rabbiting along!

My friend Chris built my cantra for me in about five hours on Friday. Whoopee!!

Here it is, minus the rods that hold the bobbins:

The rods that hold the bobbins aren’t in yet – I forgot to order the rods! – but they will drop into the slots on the sides. I’ll add a brake weight and a counterweight to each bobbin, like this:

velvet bobbins set up on a rod, showing weight and counterweight

The brake weight’s job is just to put a little friction on the yarn so the bobbin doesn’t spin out of control. The counterweight (right-hand weight) is what tensions the yarn. It’s basically live-weight tension for individual threads.

Now that the cantra is built, I can start winding bobbins and tying on the pile warp. My plan is to do polychrome velvet with two different pile wefts, which (for non-weavers) basically means you get two colors of the fluffy bits, and can choose what color of fuzz you want on top.

Not satisfied with two solid colors (why do anything the easy way when the hard way will do?), I’m doing two color gradients, one in each set of pile warps.

Pile warp one will be a blue to green to blue gradient, like this:

Pile warp two will be a yellow to red gradient, like this:

I had already experimented with designs a bit, and you can see the results in this blog post.

This time, instead of hunting down royalty-free imagery on the Web, I decided to play with Dall-E again. I spent about twenty minutes playing with different artistic styles. I finally settled on two designs to develop further: a California poppy in a woodcut style, and (in honor of Lunar New Year) a Chinese dragon, paper-cut style.

I took them into Photoshop and started modifying the images and simulating the gradients. Here’s the poppy, so far:

I’m not super pleased by the green anthers, and may change them to the orange. Or maybe not. It’s not realistic, but it does add nice visual focus to that sea of orange.

I will also probably change the frame to blue/green rather than yellow/red – far less distracting. Or I could just make it plain black, which might work even better.

I’m still working on the dragon, but I’m excited about the possibilities! Here’s the partly-finished drawing:

Yellow/red and green/blue Chinese dragon

I need to add more touches of blue and green and fiddle around a bit, but I think it will look really good when I’m done.

It will still be a while before I’m actually weaving velvet, though. I need more tools, for one thing. For another, I have to wind 440 bobbins and get all those threads loaded onto the loom. So it will likely be another month of prep work before I’m actually weaving anything.

(I know that takes patience…but can’t I be patient faster?!?)

To assuage my impatience, I’ve started picking out yarns for the pile warps. Here is the blue-to-green gradient (pardon the messy table):

blue to green spools arranged in a color gradient

I’m using the ones in the middle row; the other two rows are candidate yarns that I eventually decided not to use.

I spent this afternoon working on bobbin-winding. After nearly four painstaking hours, I had wound….five bobbins.

But what beautiful bobbins!

I didn’t actually spend four hours winding those five bobbins, of course. Mostly I was figuring out the process of creating bobbins, and how to make sure they all had about the same amount of thread. I still have to make some modifications to my process, but I think I’ve mostly figured it out.

You may have noticed that each of the bobbins has several colors on it. Four colors, in fact. This is because I’ve only got one spool of most of my colors, but I rather like it – it adds subtle color variations, and a little pizzazz.

These are only test bobbins; I’ll actually be winding 220 bobbins in each color gradient. Once I have the process down, it should go a lot faster.

I’m already dreaming of advanced structural games I can play while weaving velvet. The possibilities are AMAZING. But first, I have to get the loom set up and the basics down. Patience, grasshopper!

January 15, 2024 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Sorting lots and lots of spools (with video!)

The last week has been mostly boring infrastructure upgrades. Grace (my TC-2 jacquard loom) uses plastic pistons to help raise the threads. When it’s damp or hot, the piston expands ever-so-slightly, and threads start raising or lowering incorrectly.

Digital Weaving Norway, which makes the TC-2, recently developed a new type of plastic piston that doesn’t have this problem. I elected to upgrade to the new piston….which means replacing one piston for every heddle on the loom. I have 3,080 heddles on the loom.

It takes 13.75 seconds to replace a single piston. (Not that I timed it, of course 😉 ).The working position is so unergonomic that I can only work for about ten minutes at a time if I want to avoid back and wrist problems. So it is going to take 70-75 working sessions to replace all the pistons. At least a month, maybe two or three.

Oh well. To paraphrase the old saying, “A journey of 3,080 pistons begins with getting off your duff and doing it.” So I am.

However, everything is not dull and boring! To weave velvet, I got 480 spools of rayon embroidery thread, in 120 different colors. Four spools of each color.

I expected them to arrive in a nice neat box, organized by color. What I wound up with….was this.

That is not a small box, as you might think by looking at the picture. It’s a 55-quart box, and it’s about 3/4 full. A HUGE jumble, many in very similar colors.

How on earth was I going to pick out the four matching spools of each color from the jumble?

I decided to sort them all by color. Since I wanted to organize them by hue (red, yellow, blue, green, etc.) when I put them away, I started with a rough sort: all the pink/magenta spools in one area, all the yellows in another area, and so on. Then I sorted them by value (darkness). The human eye is very sensitive to values, so organizing a whole bunch of pink (etc.) spools by value went quickly as well.

In all it took me only 47 minutes (10 seconds per spool!) to organize everything. I thought you might find the process entertaining, so I recorded a video, at 15x speed so you can watch the whole process in just over 4 minutes. It’s strangely soothing.

Of course, in the grand tradition of jigsaw-puzzles, one spool turned up missing. It’s a green one. I imagine it’ll turn up someday…perhaps it has found a higher calling, as a cat toy!

December 26, 2023 by Tien Chiu 9 Comments

A fabulous new tool: the Mesdan knotter!

Well! The new warp is dyed. This time, I got a little overenthusiastic with the dye, so while there are no white spots, there’s not much variation in color, either. It’s mostly deep navy blue, almost black, with a few lighter and a few darker spots, and some areas with hints of purple. That’s fine with me.

I am also shockingly far along in the warping process, thanks to a nifty new tool that is the best invention since duct tape (the wheel is sooooo 5000 BC). It’s a Mesdan fisherman’s knotter, and it looks like this:

It ties knots. Tight, secure knots with the ends neatly clipped off. A thing of beauty.

(There’s another, better-known-among-weavers, knotter, called the Boyce Weaver’s Knotter, which is now discontinued. You can get them on eBay, but they tend to be worn-out antiques from long-shuttered weaving mills. As a result, they also tend not to work. (I have four, none of which work, to prove it.))

My new Mesdan fisherman’s knotter, on the other hand, is another kettle of fish. This one is brand-new, purchased from A.B. Carter in North Carolina, and works 100% reliably. It has completely revolutionized my warping process. It also does my laundry, whitens my teeth, and irons my morning paper (or would, if I still got a physical newspaper!). PLUS, it slices my bread (take that, sliced bread!).

Well, maybe not quite ALL that…but close?

To put a new warp onto a jacquard loom, one ties each thread of the new warp to a thread of the old warp. This means one knot for every thread in the warp. And there can be a LOT of knots.

B.K. (Before Knotter), I tied all my knots by hand. This is every bit as slow and fussy as you might imagine, and also hard on the hands. By hand, I tie on at about 2 threads/minute. After an hour, I need to break for several hours because my thumbs get sore. So on a good day, working full tilt, I might be able to hand-tie 250 knots or so.

The two warps I’m putting on now require tying over TWO THOUSAND knots. 2,200, to be exact.

For obvious reasons, I was not looking forward to a week and a half of tediously hand-tying knots, followed by another two days of finding and fixing all the places where a knot let loose or a thread got tangled. NO FUN. (Sad face.)

Enter the Mesdan knotter. It ties tighter, much more secure knots than I can, with much less fussing. Lay two threads into the knotter, put them under light tension, pull the trigger, and voila! A nice, tight knot, with the ends neatly clipped off. I don’t even have to test it to make sure it’s secure, unlike my hand-tied knots.

It took me a while to figure out a setup that was both ergonomic and convenient. Here’s a pic of my setup, for anyone who’s interested in using one:

Mesdan Fisherman's Knotter mounted for tying new warps onto old

And here’s a video of the knotter in action (if you want to get the gory details of my setup, rewind to the beginning of the video, which explains everything).

Using this knotter, I tied on the ENTIRE painted warp in just a few hours! Four days of tedious, hard-on-the-hands work compressed into a single day. SO much faster. WAY more comfortable. And….dare I say it? Actually FUN!

Hard as it is to believe, this may even be niftier than blue tape.

Now I’m hard at work on the velvet warp. This one is going much more slowly, because it requires a precise sequence of threads that would be disastrous to get wrong. So I am checking each small group of threads six times, in six different ways, to make sure all is well. Nevertheless, it’s going faster than I would have believed possible. In only a day and a half, I’m already halfway done:

I expect to finish tomorrow or the day after, cutting my warping time from 14 days to 4 days and removing 90% of the tedium and frustration. WHOOPEE!!!! Warp speed ahead.

Meanwhile, I know pictures of your food are sooooo 2000’s, but we had a very tasty porchetta for Christmas dinner, and it was so beautiful I can’t resist sharing:

Pork belly, seasoned and tightly tied by The Fatted Calf in San Francisco, cooked in our sous vide cooker for 36 hours, and then deep-fried for 5-10 minutes to crisp the outside. SO GOOD.

And served with carrots, parsnips, and onions slathered in bacon fat, seasoned with thyme and pepper, and roasted slowly for 45 minutes:

C. made a pecan pie as well, but unfortunately I forgot to take a photo. C. says it was delicious, though!

The cats did not get porchetta for dinner, but they got extra cat treats and lots of snuggles. A lovely day, for all of us.

Happiness to all, whatever you celebrated!

December 19, 2023 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Setbacks in the search for velvet

I finally gave up rinsing, though I got enough of the blue out that the rinse water was only tinted. Then I beamed the warp onto the loom:

The trick of “crocheting” around the warp before dyeing seems to have helped. Despite a zillion rinses, the warp went on smoothly with a minimum of tangling and very few loose threads. Much better than other painted warps I’ve done before.

The warp is not perfect. As you can see in the photo, there are some undyed white bits where the warp stuck together and didn’t take the dye. They’re sprinkled throughout the warp, a few here and there, just enough to be truly irritating (and ruin perfection).

I’m pretty sure that the problem was too short a presoak, and/or not scouring (washing) the yarn prior to dyeing. I dumped it straight into a soda ash solution and painted it twelve hours later; the yarn clumped together and never got entirely wet. Because it was still dry in places, the dye didn’t absorb properly despite my best efforts. I should have known better; that’s what comes of rushing.

Now, the choice: leave the flawed warp on, or spend another week winding and dyeing a replacement?

If I were to weave this warp off, I’d have to either fix or cover up any white bits while weaving, which would be time-consuming and produce a less-than-perfect result.

If I were to discard it, I’d lose a week’s work and all the trouble that went into winding, dyeing, and endless rinsing. Plus the effort of putting the warp onto the loom!

Regret over lost time and effort, however, is not the best way to make decisions. Economists call this the “sunk-cost fallacy,” and it generally leads to throwing good resources (time, energy, money) after bad. We develop attachment to anything we’ve spent a lot of time and energy on, so often we waste MORE time and energy trying to “rescue” a failing project when walking away and starting over would make much more sense.

This applies to many things beyond weaving projects. For example, someone who got a law degree but then realized they hate practicing law, might feel they “ought” to stay in law because they spent a lot of time and effort getting that degree. And then spend the next 10-15 years as a lawyer, hating their job. Better to get out as soon as possible, so you aren’t suffering for more years or decades because you made a wrong decision earlier.

Seth Godin has an excellent method for overcoming the sunk-cost fallacy. Instead of thinking about the time and effort you’ve already put in, think of whatever you have now as a gift, freely given, from your past self. You can accept that gift…or say “Thank you, it’s not for me.”

So. Past Self gave me (thank you!) a warp that is dyed and on the loom, but which has flaws. Do I keep the gift, and spend another 200 hours working with it? Or do I politely decline, and start over?

I spent a couple days mulling this and decided to start over. The amount of time I’d spend twiddling with fixes is far greater than the cost of creating a new warp. I politely thanked Past Self for the gift, though. It was thoughtful of her to get the process started, even if her gift isn’t what I need right now.

So the new warp is wound, PROPERLY dyed, and in the rinse cycle. Hopefully the cycle won’t be endless this time!

Meanwhile, I have finished rinsing another warp. This one is destined to be samples (in many different colorways) for a class about painted warps. It’s 17 yards long, so that is a lot of weaving to do!

On the powerlifting front, some major successes. I’m testing my 1RMs this week. The 1RM is short for “one-rep max,” which is the most weight you can lift, just once. In August, my squat 1RM was 300 pounds. Today, I lifted 310! That is ten pounds of progress in just four months – that is amazing for someone who’s been lifting as long as I have. I LOVE my coach!

I had to fight like heck for this one, though. You can actually hear me say “nope” about halfway through to signal my spotters that I was not going to be able to lift it. Of course, as soon as I did, the weight FINALLY started moving. I’m glad they didn’t believe me!

310 pounds, of course, is 1,240 weasels, for those who remember my first powerlifting post in 2018. I was measuring weights in Standard Weasels (aka four ounces), and my long-term goal was just 700 weasels.

And now? The USPA national record for my age/weight class is only 325 pounds (1,300 weasels). I’d need to beat it by at least 5 pounds to set a new record, so my goal is 330 pounds, or 1,320 weasels.