081: Finding Your Colour Courage with Tien Chiu

Our 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 t