Tag Archives: spinning with colour

Yosemite Colourway: Managing Colours

After my ~~self-proclaimed success~~ pleasant experience with the Lupine Forest colourway, I decided that I needed to stretch myself right out of my comfort zone: colourwise. So when I visited the Peace Arch Weavers and Spinners Guild annual Spin-In a few weekends ago, (where there are VENDORS so you can BUY FIBRE) I came away with four additional colourways from my newly discovered local dyer Kinfolk Yarn and Fibre. One of them was Yosemite (on Organic Polwarth), fraught with primary colours and all the secondary colours but purple. Take note of that.

Here it is on display just hours after I bought it. I met my husband for lunch and simply couldn’t leave it in the car. I had to look at it and start studying it because it scared me. Okay, scared is too strong a word, but was not sure how to work with it. What scared me about it? All the strong contrasting colours. What would they look like plied against each other. Would it be a muted yarn with all the intensity of the colours washed out from the balancing that comes from putting complementary colours next to each other?

When I approach spinning these lovely dyed braids, I pull them apart and try to line them up so I can see the colours and the colour repeats. Given this, see below, I initially thought about making a 4-ply yarn. There are eight repeats that could work. But I don’t have a lazy kate that holds 4 bobbins (weak excuse I know). Seriously, I wanted the colours to be strong so the singles needed to be thicker than I normally spin. If I made a 4-ply yarn I’d have a bulky yarn and that wasn’t what I wanted, at this point anyway.

I decided to make a 3-ply yarn and spin the singles a bit thicker than I normally do. That way the colour intensity would prevail. I divided the roving in three equal lengths. I further divided those rovings into 2 parts, 4 parts, and 8 parts – width wise, as seen in the wee balls below ready for spinning.

I first spun the balls of four onto bobbin one, and then spun another bobbin with the balls of eight sections. After further reflection I decided that wanted the yarn to be a “wildly dancing fractal yarn” so I needed to further divide it. Thus the bobbin that was to have a roving split only into two sections was divided into 16. Yes, 16. That was challenging, but it promised no long lengths of any one colour.

This yarn was spun and plied all in the same day. Not because that is the best approach, but because I was impatient to see the result. And here it is. The mini-skein to the right is what was left of the two of the bobbins (the four and the eight).

I love this yarn. I love the way all the colours come out and are fully present. I didn’t spin it fine, so optical mixing doesn’t have as great a chance to occur, With the thicker singles, the colour is strong. Even though I love it, I am also cautious, because I have had experience with yarn that I loved in the skein and hated once knitted and vice versa.

For now I admire it and make plans for it. A cowl, a pair of mitts and a hat? A scarf? Or another lovely skein that I pet and admire.

Lupine Forest – playing with a colourway

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Ever since my stint at Olds College teaching a class called Wild About Colour, I’ve been obsessed with dyed rovings. I spent a great deal of time developing this class and want to deliver it again and again and again. I also want to make it longer, maybe two days. . . . there’s so much to do and learn and discover when you open the box of colour. So I’ve been thinking about it and colour a lot lately.

One (delightful) challenge in planning and organizing my classes is finding good quality, reliable sources for my materials. And to continue my 100-mile wear sentiment, I want to support local artisans – so I went looking for them.

At Fibres West 2016, I was drawn to the Kinfolk Yarn and Fibre booth. I was teaching a full schedule and didn’t really have time shop. Makes some of us wonder why we choose to teach. I loved her colours and from the way she presented her work I knew she was an artist at heart. If you want to challenge this, please do. That will be an excellent blog post for me to articulate in writing.

So, earlier this month, we met up and talked fibre, colours, and supply for workshops. I came away from that meeting with four colourways to play with and excitement about working with a new dyer. As much as I am a visual person, I am also inspired by language, so often the title of a colourway will get me thinking. . . Lupine Forest. Sometimes the name of a colourway will irritate me, but in this case, it truly inspired me because for the first time, I have lupines in my garden.

This is the story of Lupine Forest.

Here is what the braid looked like when it was all rolled up.

I pulled it apart to see how (and if) the colours repeat and to get a sense of the entire roving. Lovely, lovely stuff. Lots of purple and green with the occasional section of brown. I couldn’t wait to play with it.

I wanted the knitted fabric to look like lupines. You know those flowers? In the wild they are mostly purple and have long stems with symmetrical repeats of blossoms along the stems. A perfect candidate for the barber-polling that some spinners dread, and go to great lengths to avoid.

So I pulled off a length of it, ended up being a third of the roving, split that in six sections and spun that up. Here it is. A mere 44 grams.

I wanted to have a barber-polling effect, to replicate the look of lupines, so I chose a green BFL that I had in my stash. It was far too bright and consistent, so I blended it on my hand carders with two other greens that more accurately reflect the colours of the forest, and made several of the rolags you see below. The bright green that I wanted to play down is the green at the very bottom. Plied with the purples, it would look like lupines; with brown it would look like forest with underbrush; with the greens, it would simply add depth. That was my thinking.

That gave me these two bobbins that I plied into a soft-two ply yarn.

That you see here. A 75 gram skein. A decent amount for a wee project.

This is a perfect example, for me anyways, of a yarn that disappointed. I thought I had gone too far with the greens and washed away all the purple. What’s the use? The lupines were all lost in the sea of green. But. . . never completely judge your yarn/result until you knit it up.

Knit up into a quick half-mitt (Simple Lines) project, you can see that the purple of the lupines was maintained. The forest is there with the greens throughout and the occasional browns of the trunks of trees. (This photo doesn’t truly show the colours, they are much warmer.)

I have another two-thirds of this braid that I have other plans for. I want to spin a yarn so the purple really “pops” so that will mean spinning a thick/thin yarn. Let’s see how that works out.

In the meantime, I want to thank Kyla for this lovely braid of fibre. It was so beautifully dyed, no felting or crunchy parts, no dye residue when I washed the yarn. Lovely and soft for a pair of hands wanting warmth in the coming months.

Wild about Colour: finally there!

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I am going to be teaching 4 full-day workshops at Olds College in Olds, Alberta this year during Fibre Week 2016. As you can imagine, I am over the moon to have been asked, to have my proposals accepted and then to have the classes get sufficient enrollment that they are a go!

The first one up is called Wild About Colour. Here is the short description for it:

This workshop is all about making sense of those wonderful hand painted braids we are seeing everywhere. Learn how to make a series of decisions that will help you get the yarn and effect you want from the colours in your painted braids. In this full-day workshop you will learn some basic and advanced techniques for working with hand painted top. Colour theory will be discussed and practically applied throughout the day.

We will start with basic 2-ply techniques and move into the wondrous world of fractal spinning. After making several fractal samples, we will work on combination drafting and also learn how to make ombre yarn. Skills such as hand carding and Navajo plying will be learned along the way. At the end of this workshop you will be wild about colour and never again hesitant about working with hand painted top.

This is a newly developed class, and though I’ve been thinking about it for years, I haven’t actually had the chance to make it a reality, until now.

For the last while I’ve been puzzling over how to get the most learning out of a 6-hour class. How many exercises can people complete in that time? What number of exercises and which ones will help people understand the fundamental principles of working with hand painted braids and then be able to apply them in other situations?

What’s the best way to teach colour theory, so we don’t get bogged down in it or confused by it, but inspired? These and several other questions have kept me up at night. In the last couple of months, I’ve been experimenting with the workshop plan. I’ve put myself through this class three times already, as each time I tinker with the exercises, the fibre and the flow of the day.

There’s no spoiler alert necessary here, because I have decided that I am not going to tell you my plan, until after the workshop. I want the 12 participants to be the first to see what’s up and how things are going to roll out. All I will say is that there will be seven different lovely coloured superwash BFL colourways from Sweet Georgia Yarns, and 14 different colours of Corriedale top from Fibres Plus that folks will be playing with.

The photos below are some of the shots of my planning and organizing for the class. More about the other classes in future posts.