Potential Perfection
There is something about a warp when it is wound onto the warping board. It is there, ready to be the perfect design, the perfect pattern, the perfect fabric. All that untapped potential, just waiting for me to get it onto the loom and find it as I weave.
No pressure then.
I plan my warps out before I wind them. Sometimes if it is a regular pattern with a strong visual, I might just go for it. I have the warp dyed in shades of green to make a pleated scarf in 3/1 and 1/3 twill and when the time comes I will just wind it onto the warp board, counting balanced stripes in the two colours. If there are more colours to go into the warp, or I'm winding a warp for sampling where there will be an element of designing on the loom as I go, I will create a yarn wrap. This is where I wrap yarn around a card strip until the balance of colours is right, at which point I measure the colour block and use the number of ends per inch to work out how many ends in each stripe I need before I wind them off.
Sometimes, when the resulting fabric will be a bit more complex, such as in double weave, I get the coloured pencils and the squared paper out (Can you hear my inner geek singing with happiness? It's amazing the pleasure I get from simple things...)
This is the case with this warp. I've chosen six Shetland yarns, which is more than I've used in a double weave warp before, and I'm going to be using block threading, so I need to think it though so I don't end up with all the dark values in one area and the lights in the other.
Looking at my plan, the first two bars show what I think of as the "straight" layers - one is made up of blocks of five colours, the other is entirely made up of the sixth, the natural. Underneath it, I have drawn two more bars and a potential placement for the blocks. Using block threading means that I start to interchanges blocks from one layer with blocks from the other. I didn't particularly like the first attempt I tried - although I am a big fan of regular repeating patterns, I didn't like the way these came out. The final pair of bars show a different distribution of blocks and I am much happier with this - the re are narrower blocks and wider ones and I find it visually more interesting that a pattern that has ended up looking like brick work (which gives me another deign idea... another reason for recording the things that don't work for a project as well as the ones that do!)
So once the warp is planned, I wind it off. This warp is going onto a single back beam so I wind the two layers together - one strand of the natural always running alongside one strand of the other colours.
And this is now where this project is - a warping board full of potential, waiting for me to unleash it in the combinations of warp yarns and block heights I choose. Bring it on!
