I’ll be using the word questionable to describe any blend that would cast doubt in the mind of even the most experienced spinner. A blend that would cause you to pause before ordering it and question how it might turn out.
Novice spinners are regularly attracted to the bold, multi-coloured stripes of a vertically blended top, but are frequently left disappointed when their beautiful combed top turns to mud on the wheel. In this series, I’ll be sharing several techniques that can help reduce the amount of optical mixing during spinning, so that some of those original colours still show up in the final yarn. By the end, the tops will almost certainly not be questionable.
Twinkle Twinkle
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| Images of Twinkle Twinkle - Reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
Above are the images of Twinkle Twinkle from the World of Wool website. They don't look like the same blend! The first image is much too washed out, and while the second image is a slightly closer representation of Twinkle Twinkle, the yellow is much more prominent than in the blended top I have in front of me.
Above are the colours of the merino and bamboo fibres within Twinkle Twinkle. Optical mixing is magical! Even when I opened the fibre at home, I was sure there must be some purple or blue in there.
Here’s my photograph of Twinkle Twinkle, and to my eye, it’s a very close representation of the top I purchased. I’m so confused! This barely resembles the images on the World of Wool website. It’s beautiful! Either something has gone amiss in the blending process, or World of Wool need to take a look at their photography because the website images do not do this blend justice. It’s beautiful!
I originally chose Twinkle Twinkle as I wanted to see how the yellow bamboo fibres would neutralise the more purple hues within the blend. On opening it, I was hopeful that I shouldn’t see too much brown in my final yarns, as the yellow is much more subtle than the website images suggest.
I arranged all the yarns from the blends in this series into a kind of muted gradient, and I’ll be spinning them in this order. They have all been spun with no attention paid to colour management; they’ve simply been pre-drafted, spun, and then chain-plied.
To begin with, I spun 8g of Twinkle Twinkle to see how it looks when I allow the colours to freely mix together during spinning. I just drafted it out and then spun it from the tips. I then chain-plied it at the wheel to achieve a 3-ply yarn.
Much like the Hawaiian Dreams I spun previously, the resulting yarn is a very pretty, tonal purple. This time it's much darker and richer with a golden sheen, thanks to the 15% yellow bamboo content. It's beautiful, and a colour I would very happily wear!
From a distance, the colours optically mix together into a warm aubergine colour, heathered with purples and pinks. This one is going to be very difficult to achieve distinct colour variations as it’s so well blended, but I’m looking forward to spinning it to see what I manage to come up with.
(Ad) Most of the yarns in this series will be spun on my Electric Eel Wheel 6 - This is an affiliate link. If you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a small percentage of the purchase price at no additional cost to you. Any income from my blog goes a small way toward funding future blog projects.
Spinning Twinkle Twinkle 4 Different Ways
Spinning from the Fold - Short Draw
I'm spinning all of the yarns in this series from the fold as this is one of the most popular ways of trying to keep the colours in a multicoloured top a bit more separate.
To prepare my fibre for spinning from the fold, I grasp the full width of the top at the very tips and just pull. This allows me to spin from just a little over a staple length of fibre.
Over the course of writing my Questionable Blends blog series, I’ve been working on improving my long-draw spinning - a technique I find much easier when I spin from the fold. However, I decided to spin Twinkle Twinkle using a short sideways draft as I’m beginning to suspect that long-draw spinning from the fold increases the possibility of the colours mixing together. Twinkle Twinkle is one of the more blended tops in this series, so hopefully this will result in a little less colour blending.
It’s definitely a theory I plan to explore more thoroughly in the future…
Here is my single, spun from the Fold with very little twist entering the drafting zone. As is usual with yarn spun from the fold, the colour sections are short, but it's reassuring to see quite a few pops of colour in there.
The final chain-plied yarn is a very subtle heathered autumnal purple that is much less flat-looking than the yarn spun from pre-drafted top.
The knitted fabric is a pleasing autumnal purple with subtle pops of colour that add a little visual interest without being distracting.
Splitting the Top Vertically
All of the blends in this series were split vertically as it's one of the easiest ways of ensuring the colours in a blended top don't completely mix together when you spin them.
As Twinkle Twinkle is so well blended, I had to tear it into quite thin strips to ensure that my final yarn had a little more colour variation. Some of the sections were so thin that I ended up combining two or three nests of similar colours together so that I had a fibre supply that was thick enough for me to draft from.
As you can see, most of my nests are similar in colour, but a few of the lighter ones should stand out to add a little visual interest to my final yarn
This may well be the most subtle yarn I've spun by splitting the top vertically.
It is rewarding to see those subtle purple and orange streaks running through the yarn...
... which show up as gentle colour fluctuations in the knitted mitred squares.
Hand Combing a Gradient
Back in 2023, I used my hackle to turn a custom blended merino and bamboo top into a gradient.
In my experience, bamboo fibres tend to be shorter, on average, than merino fibres. By taking advantage of the differences in average fibre length, you can often achieve a gradient when you remove the fibres thinly from a hackle or comb.
Here you can see that there are more of the shorter yellow bamboo fibres in the middle of my combed nest. The merino - being a more natural fibre than the bamboo rayon - has a much wider range of fibre lengths, so they are distributed throughout the combed top with a greater proportion of merino fibres on the outside of the nest.
I repeated the combing four times and arranged the nests in alternating order to avoid abrupt colour changes when I spin them.
This technique results in one of the more striking yarns with streaks of purple and muddy orange.
Knitting it up, I get a kind of gradient that gently cycles through the colour changes. If I were to use this technique for a sweater, I would probably diz the fibres off my hackle to give me much longer sections of colours. Plying two, three, or more gradient singles together rather than chain-plying them would give me an even longer gradient with complex, dithered colour transitions.
Making Blending Board Pencil Roving
This is a technique I discovered while I was writing my Spinning into Focus blog series.
I break off just one length of top that’s a little over the length of my blending board. I then open it up so that all of the colours are sitting next to each other, rather than on top of one another. The fibres are then just laid on top of the blending board in a single layer, while trying to get them to stretch across the full width of blending board.
I then brush the fibres down, starting at the bottom and gently working my way gradually up the board, holding the fibres above the brush to keep them straight.
With the two blending board dowels, I draft off all of the fibre into one single blending board rolag.
You can see that opening up the top and arranging it in a thin layer across the whole of the board allows me to now spin the blended top from the side, rather than the end. I can spin the colours one after the other rather than all at the same time.
Unfortunately, thick blending board rolags are quite unpleasant to spin from as they take quite a bit of tugging, and the colours have a tendency to bunch together and optically mix into a single hue.
To avoid this, I draft the rolag out into pencil roving, making it much more enjoyable to spin from, and increasing the chances of getting more fluctuations of colour throughout the final yarn.
It’s lovely to see a nice selection of blues, pinks, purples, and even greens in there.
But the final chain-plied yarn is still very subtle and understated.
The knitted mitred square sample shows the greatest variety of colours without being too busy.
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It should be noted that the first and last yarns are woollen prepped, rather than worsted. Even though they were both spun short-draw, the singles still don’t have quite the same sheen and smoothness as the two yarns spun from the end of combed top.
From left to right - spun from the fold, split vertically, combed gradient, and blending board pencil roving.
Yet again, I’m so very thankful to have started my Questionable Blend series. I never would have bought Twinkle Twinkle based on the images on the World of Wool website otherwise. Whichever method I chose to prepare it resulted in a beautiful dusky pink/light aubergine, that I would very happily wear.
My next blend will be the final Questionable Blend in this series, and I think it’s going to be an interesting one…
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