Warp planning completed!

I finished planning out my warp yesterday. Here is the graphic of the color sequence:

The left-hand column is the ground warp, the center column the pattern warp. The right-hand column is the weft.

As you can probably guess, the bottom three sections (which will be the first ones woven) will be samples. The first half-yard or so will be devoted to loom waste, debugging, and testing four different weft colors. I’ll mark it off at the half-yard point by tying the warp tightly – the tight tie will resist the dye and result in a white mark running crosswise across the warp, which I will use to align the warps when beaming on.

After that, the next 27″ will be testing out a red-to-gold color gradient in the phoenixes, against a black background. I am deliberately omitting lemon yellow as the end of the color gradient since in my experience it turns greenish when crossed with black (optical mixing at work!). You can see this in the photo of my shawl “Black Fire”:

The gold and orange sections look much warmer than the lemon yellow ones when crossed with black, and since it’s warmth I’m after, I’m sticking to gold.

After the black sample I’ll put in another “dividing line” with a tightly tied tie, and move into the next sample: a deep orange ground warp that will be airbrushed with swirls of darker red and yellow-orange, to give a sense of movement in the background. The phoenixes will be yellow, except where I airbrush over parts of the pattern to give the feel of a phoenix partially hidden by wisps of fire.

That’s the last of the samples. After that come three scarf warps: one in deep orange, to be airbrushed like the last sample (or cut off if the airbrushing doesn’t “work”), one in black with the color gradient in the phoenixes, and one in bright yellow against red/orange. If it works out, the last one will be an entry into the Handwoven 2013 Garment Contest, so I’ll design a pattern that can be woven on eight shafts and on the threading already on the loom. I haven’t figured out what pattern yet, but I doodled up this one this morning:

I’m moderately pleased with this pattern and will weave it up if nothing better crops up in the interim.

Ten yards is a pretty long warp for this size thread (90 picks per inch times nine usable yards of warp = nearly 30,000 picks), so I may well get bored before the end of the warp – but if so, I’ll simply cut it off and start something else. Never a dull moment!