Come and join us in the planning of our next collection of woven wraps and fabric! We’ve been doing this for years and have developed a pretty good system, but we need your help with the decision making.  You can have your say on every aspect of the creative process!

• The first step in planning a new collection is choosing the warp colour. All the wraps will be woven on this, so it is the one element that they’ll all have in common.
• The 2nd step is to choose wefts.
• The final step is to choose which design will best suit that warp/weft combination!
  

To directly contradict what we said earlier about choosing the warp first, we already have a rough idea for a couple of wefts that we want to feature in this collection,but the final form they could take is still quite flexible.

Weft 1: A rainbow grad, similar to Bifrost but not necessarily the exact same colours

Weft 2 This space dyed 3 ply compact cotton. We could mix this with other fibres to create an interesting blend. Those other fibres could be any colour (natural, teal to enhance the seagreen flecks in the yarn, aqua, orange?!)

We’ll probably use 4 different wefts in this new weave collection, so we’ll have another 2 to pick later.

So with that in the back of our minds, on  with choosing the warp!

We’re planning to weave on a ‘split warp’. Wrap cloth is woven double width, so we effectively weave two identical wraps at the same time,  splitting the cloth down the middle to separate them once it comes off the loom.
When we wind the warp onto the beam ready for weaving, we can use different coloured yarn for each half. This means that we’ll weave two wraps with identical weft and design, but each on a different coloured warp. This is an example of a split warp during weaving.

It is a clever way of working for a micro-manufacturer such as ourselves, but it can be tricky to make sure that the design and weft combination works equally well on both coloured warps.

We’ve already chosen the colour for one half of the warp. We’re going to use the mustard yellow that was the sunhaze warp in a grad that fades from golden sunlight through natural shades to a cream similar to the cirrus warp. We think it will feel fresh, warm and very classy!

We want the other half of the wrap to have a very different look, giving the whole collection a much broader range. If the yellow/cream grad is sunrise then we want a suitable nightfall to partner it.

We’ve thought of 4 potential options. 

These first two are both solid colours. Whilst grads can be exciting because of the increased range of colours, there is beauty in the simplicity of just a single warp and weft combination.

Twilight is your first option.
Whilst we’ve had ‘Twilight’ wraps in the shop recently, those were a different shade of blue to the original deep indigo of the early Twilight wraps. With this release we’d be going right back to our roots with our signature colour- the perfect balance between blue and purple, a richness of colour without losing the delicacy of the shade.

The second option would be an aubergine purple with the working name of Tintagel. We’ve used this before, as the darkest of the 3 purple shades in the Callisto warp.

The next two ideas are both grad warps. This would mirror the sunrise half of the collection and both would be new colour combinations not woven before.

The third option would be a graduated combination of two existing warp colours- Twilight and a shade just a tad darker than Stargaze, joined in the middle by an intermediary shade. We’ve called it Starlight as a fusion of those two warps! Whilst still in the blue arena, they create a more desaturated grad, leaning towards indigo and grey.

Blue graduated colour warp

The fourth and final option is a truer blue grad, utilising both old and new twilight shades and following them with a more steely toned sapphire. We’ve called that Skymning.

All of these options could work beautifully with the right combination of wefts and designs, so we need to go with the popular consensus of which you’d most like to wear, then we can carry on with the collection crafting process!

We’ll give you a few days to let us know your thoughts, then we’ll move on to the next step of the process. Look out for the discussion threads in our facebook community group!
We don’t yet have a timescale for weaving these wraps, and it might be early 2025 before they’re sewn and ready to wear. We’ll be running a pre-order as with our last release, because quantities will be limited.
If you need some inspiration to help with the decision making (and get your ideas started about wefts/designs too) then check out our previous releases below.

Firespiral Wrap Database: Indexed by Warp Name

“The warp is the yarn that runs lengthways through your wrap. We have to wind [...]

20
May