081: Finding Your Colour Courage with Tien Chiu

Send us Fan MailOur guest this week is Tien Chiu: a master weaver and (in Tien’s own words) a “certified colour nut”. Tien’s work has been exhibited in museums and featured on the cover of Handwoven magazine. She’s the author of Master Your Craft: Strategies for Designing, Making, and Selling Artisan Work; a book about creative process in craft. She has woven hundred of handwoven fabric swatches and dyed over 2,500 yarn samples in her quest to understand colour. Tien now teaches about colour in weaving at warpandweave.com. Please join Felicia and Tien as they chat about weaving, colour, and the courage to make mistakes.  “You can do so many things with weaving… There’s this thing that I think of as the ratio between head and hands… it’s the amount of design time versus the amount of time that you spend making something. So I like solving puzzles… and with knitting there’s not as much to think about… I can design something in knitting that will take a lot longer to knit than it will to design in general… with weaving I find that 80% of my time is spent in design and that’s the part that I really enjoy… It will take me months to design something that will take me about a week and a half to weave.  ” – Tien Chiu on explaining her love of weaving In this episode, we talk about: 1:18 Felicia asks Tien how she got started with the fibre arts 4:36 Tien describes how she became a textile artist full-time 7:55 Tien chats about how she discovered one of her main passions in life: weaving 12:22 Felicia asks Tien about her weaving equipment 14:48 Tien offers words of encouragement to those who are curious about weaving but don’t know where to start 16:44 Tien discusses her time with studying with master weaver Laura Fry 21:52 Felicia asks Tien how she furthers her weaving education on her own after spending time with Laura 27:05 Tien chats about her online school Warp & Weave that teaches classes about colour and weaving and her phenomenal library of Procion MX fibre-reactive dye samples on her website 33:27 Felicia asks Tien what her goal is in creating this school to teach about colour 38:38 Where you can find Tien and her work online 39:32 Felicia’s Final Notes and Giveaway!   Here’s Where You Can Find Tien: Warp & Weave: www.warpandweave.com Warp & Weave Courses Page: www.classes.warpandweave.com Tien’s Blog: www.tienchiu.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/warpandweavecolor   Enter the Giveaway for a free online course from Warp & Weave: Tien is giving away a free pass to her online course: Colour Courage for Weavers -Basic! If you’d like a chance to win one of this amazing course, click the link below and enter this episode’s secret word. Thank you so much to Tien for donating this prize to our listeners!