Fire Series Warp Beamed

The warp is beamed, and I've started threading. Here's the warp, showing the blending of the two warp colors, with areas where one or the other color is more visible.



When I had finished beaming all the sections, here's how much thread was left on the cones:



Enough yardage for replacement threads where I find knots as I weave, and a very small amount left over for the stash of miscellaneous red thread, which will become a mixed warp in the future.

Now back to threading. I use the "treadle your threading" method, which lets the dobby do all the work. I copy the weaving draft into a new file, tell the weaving software to make the treadling exactly like the threading (tromp as writ, or treadle as drawn in), change the tie-up to a straight draw (each treadle lifting a single thread, from 1 to 24). The drawdown looks a bit odd, but I'm not gonna weave it after all, just use it to accomplish error-free threading. Also, I've found that it helps to make the two warp colors more contrasty in the threading draft; if I leave the colors the way they were in the weaving draft (where they approximate the actual thread colors, which in this case are very close in both value and hue) it would be harder to see in the dobby's weaving dialog box whether I've got the right color thread in my hand at any given time.



Before starting to thread, I push all the heddles over to the left side of the shafts. Then I tell the dobby unit to lift one treadle at a time. Each time it lifts a shaft, I pull a heddle from that shaft over to its proper position and thread it, being careful to maintain the color sequence. I can't imagine threading a draft like this without the dobby's help - this is the only way I can keep a grip on my sanity while threading a complicated warp.