Next Warp, Dye, Dip Dye, or Paint?

In all my color dreaming and planning for the next warp, I have pretty much thought of the warp as consisting of neutral colors. Notice on the last post that I had even decided which neutrals I planned to use, including the formulas for them. I had also thought about occasionally including some blue ends. But the color plans for the warp were basically neutrals.

On the other hand, I have been so tempted to paint the warp. There had been an aside on a WeaveTech Yahoo group email about how excited someone's students got about weaving off a painted warp. It filled me with nostalgic memories about painted warps I have done. How exciting it was to weave them. How hard it is to stop and how eager I always am to get back to the weaving.

Those warps, however were either plain weave or twill so the changing of the colors in the warps created the major focus for the finished textile. Such would not be the case in the crackle warps. They would simply provide another element of interest. The result could be confusion. This is what has really scared me away from painting the warps. However, if I don't get too fancy with the painting, I think it might work. I think I should try it.

Moreover, I do not really want to paint the warps. I want to dye them. I believe that I would get better results with the neutrals if I dip dyed those parts of the warp instead of painting them. But for the parts of the warp that are to be blue, or blue related, I am not so sure. I have never dip dyed warps, so fear brought on by inexperience holds me back. Inexperience, however, only means that I should start simply. The design should be very simple and the areas of color should be fairly long rather than short and many.

One possibility that might work is to dip dye the neutral areas but paint the blue areas. I think, however, that if I make the areas of color fairly long, that will be simple enough to have a go. I think I could get the neutrals on in one go with three dye pots on the stove. And if I used only two or three pots of blues, I might be able to finish that in another go.

If I tie crosses at both ends of the warps I could, if I wanted to, put some warp bouts on the loom beginning with one end of the warp. And the other bouts I could put on the loom beginning from the opposite end.

I have also been wondering to what extent could I rearrange groups in the raddle, and then in the threading without making a mess?

But I need to stop thinking about these rearrangement possibilities. As a beginning dip dyer, I would be getting into too much complexity without having the foggiest notion of how this would work out in the final result. Foreign as this notion is to me, I must think simple!