Thinking or overthinking?

First, an update:

Weaving was occurring until I stopped to make hot chocolate and post this. A. quite likes the colours, and I'm becoming, well, not accustomed to them, but I've had time to analyse what is distressing me. There are bits of it I quite like:

The teal/purple variegated across the orange, the purples and orange are good. And there are bits I  intensely dislike, namely that lavender with anything other than the teal/purple variegated. It doesn't make me feel ill (I have a friend, M, who is mildly nauseated by some colour combinations), but looking at it reminds me of the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. Does anyone else have similar reactions to colour, or is it just me and M?

I've been considering the effects of epi/ppi on patterning. If I don't want the warp stripes to dominate, I have to allow more weft thread to show! OK, it's obvious, but playing with the epi allows me to see this more clearly - and understand why this sort of patterning is a challenge for a baby weaver: changes in strength of beat/tension will show more in the finished object than if it were a single colour or more muted. Counting the epi/ppi and checking the squareness of things that should be square is my measurement of this. I'm fairly sure that I won't want to/have to do this once I know more about what I'm doing but at this point I need objective measurements. My ultimate goal is not just to make cloth, but to make good cloth, to have the skill to make the patterning do what I want it to do, and to do this I have to pay attention to what I'm doing so I know when my hands have done what my brain desired. I can 'just weave' for some stretches of it, but the end result isn't what I want: it's too warp-dominant. So I change a factor, weave some more, check, change, weave and so on.

While I think of it, how often do you advance the warp (is that the right term?) I find the selvedges are more even if I advance more frequently.

We've discussed before the way in which some colours are more appropriate to particular places. While the orange/purples are bright and cheerful somewhere the sunlight is bright and white and clear, here it's just... well, see for yourself.

Maybe they will be Summer Towels. When summer comes, such as it is here. This is so not the land of Actual Sun... Or I can try soil dyeing. Or my favourite dye of all, indigo. Lynn, that would be my first choice for cotton. Shades of indigo. Which leads me on to what might be the next project.

Just like the weather here. The bobbin is hand-paint BFL singles; being on the bobbin you can't see the full range of shades. The not-as-tangled-as-it-looks mess is 20/2 silk dyed in an exhausted indigo vat, and is very similar to a colour buried on the bobbin. All the colours are darker and murkier than they appear in that shot (I think Sara said once that dark warps are preferable and that, to her, a pale warp looks as though it's a carpet warp that shouldn't be showing). I need to weigh a measured length of the singles to work out how much I have, but I'd guess something over 400m, Done: I have 406m and I have 800m of the silk. If I use the silk for warp, the weft will make wide stripes. If I use the wool for warp, it will look more uniform from a distance, vertically flashed up close - unless I play with warp lengths to find out if there's an ikat-style repeat. Interesting decision. I do have another bobbin of singles in a totally different colourway, so whatever I do with this, I can do something different with the other. Except that when I checked carefully, the singles are a lot thinner than the silk. I'll need to find a different pairing.
The company from which I bought the 18/2 wool in purples and plums and rust and so forth will be at a local event at the end of the month, so I can go and see all the colours in person and perhaps supplement my stock. I now have a good idea of what I want to make from it, but I will need more fabric. It's seamed up the centre back, and the fronts widen from shoulder+collar width to about my forearm plus collar at the bottom. M. says it needs sleeves, and I think she may be right; I also have to think about length on me.

On the other hand I may, however, indulge my curiosity and make a tiny short warp of handspun cotton singles to find out just how tricky they are so I can work out how to resolve the problems, because weaving handspun cotton is very, very high on my list of things I want to do. Stephenie advises washing and sizing first; I'll post pictures when the time comes. If I wash and size maybe I'll indigo as well. After all, I do want to weave denim :-)