Beaming the Fire Series Warp

I'm almost finished beaming the fire series warp. I'd have finished sooner, but we spent a couple of days with friends in Napa, attending the Napa Vally Wine Auction festivities. Which took a day to recover from. There were wine-and-food pairings under tents in one area featuring many of the best-known Napa area restaurants and wineries (lots of white wines and crisp, dry rose wines), and barrel tastings (mostly cabernet sauvignon and cab blends) indoors. I got to meet Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame, who served a snow cone consisting of marinated shrimps on top of salty granita, topped with a rich coconut milk foam - fabulous combination of tastes and textures! Anyway, we snacked and sipped to our hearts' content, and spent the rest of the afternoon napping.

So, back in the studio, here's the warping setup:



The two looms are at right angles to each other, each on one side of a rectangle of floor space set aside for warping tasks. I've made a practice of beaming the outer two sections of each warp first, then filling the inner sections. This is because with the interleaved warps, I thread the selvedge ends all in one color. There was one warp, a few years back, where I wound the sections from 1 through 10, and when I got to the last bit of section 10, I didn't have enough of color A for the selvedge, and had to thread that selvedge in color B instead. I thought it looked odd, but a weaving friend said to call it a design feature, not a flaw, and the folks who bought those scarves bought the "design feature" story too...

In any case, now I always make sure to do the selvedge sections first. Then, if I run out of color A, I simply drop some ends from one of the middle sections. Since my interleaved designs are not symmetrical, nobody'll ever know if it's a few threads narrower than the original plan. As long as I keep the color sequence going, all is well.

For this warp, the color sequence of scarlet and fuchsia is pretty intense. As the sections build up on the warping wheel, there's an almost irridescent look to the bundle of threads. I'm hoping the woven cloth will also have that quality.