The point of the threads going down and up in the warp cross is to record their order. There is no deeper meaning to which ones go up vs down. Unless you are doing plain weave, or if you care about mathematical knot theory.
(If you were doing plain weave, there’d be a relevant bonus; but you’re skipping straight ahead to patterns. So ignore whether individual warps go down or up, and just pick whoever is next in the queue.)
At the point where the cross is happening, who can slide freely? That’s who’s next.
Behold, the shitty pixels I made on my phone:
Working manga style from right to left, obviously red is first. Who’s next? Is it yellow? Imagine taking both ends of yellow and dragging the whole yellow thread to the right. It would loop around orange and drag orange along with it. That means that yellow isn’t actually free. Orange comes before yellow. Slide it on over.
Great, we sorted that out. Who’s next? We’ve got green looking pretty similar to how yellow looked last time. Does that mean green can’t move?
Imagine grabbing both ends of green and dragging it to the right. It slides freely, without making anyone else come along with it. That means green is free, and it’s the next in the queue.
The point of the warp cross is that *if you correctly isolate it*, it physically prevents you from sliding the wrong thread.
*Once you know where the cross is* you literally don’t have to guess or remember anything.
You can put it down and walk away and forget everything and come back and know which warp is the next one to thread. It’s the one that slides freely *on the edge of the isolated warp cross*.
Ok, why all the weird purple scare quotes? Let’s look at a hypothetical warp that is more fucked up:
If you try to grab both ends of one of of these warps where they meet the edge of the image frame, you won’t be able to slide any of them freely to the right.
Evil wizards twisted things around and even braided some of the ends together.
But! All hope is not lost, because the warp cross is still intact. It’s right there in the center.
We pushed the gray lease sticks as closely together as they possibly could go. If we imagine grabbing a warp just by the points where it crosses the two lease sticks, we can see that everything is already set up to slide freely in the correct order.
So, all that’s left to do is to untangle the warp ends so that they neatly flow from the warp cross.
Remember, the warps only appear to cross over each other in the “warp cross” if you view it from the side. (Like you did when you were winding it on your warping board.)
The actual definition of the warp cross is the place where the warp crosses from being on top of one lease stick to being on the bottom of the other one.
