Craft me Happy!

I’m writing a blog series this year, sharing several different ways of spinning commercially available, multicoloured blended tops. I’ve tried to choose blends that contain colours from more than half of the colour wheel. The kinds of blends that are a little tricky to guess immediately how they’ll spin up.

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 quite a few techniques that can help reduce the amount of optical blending 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.

Blaze

Images reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool

The 6th blended top in this series is Blaze.

Images reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool

These are the merino colours within Blaze. I originally chose it because it contains brown already and I was curious to see what effect this would have on the final yarn colour. Technically, this should be a difficult fibre to get wrong as the three “colours” are very close to each other on the colour wheel but it will be interesting to see what role the brown plays in the different fibre preparations I choose.

The photos of Blaze on the World of Wool website are a pretty good representation of its true colour, although I don't think it's quite so bright in real life.

I spun 8g of Blaze to see how it looks when I allow the colours to optically blend together. 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.

I love the beautiful, heathered, autumnal pumpkin orange that I achieved when I allowed the colours to mix together. It will be interesting to see if I like the final yarns as much when I allow the individual colours to shine through a little more. I’m already thinking of ways to spin a slightly more blended yarn while still getting some colour variations…

I arranged all the yarns from the blends I’ll be spinning 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.

As my goal with this series is to try to spin less muddy yarns, while trying to keep the colours more separate, the brown in this blend is throwing me off-track a little.

I’m interested to find out if switching up the way I ply the singles will give me the multi-coloured, yet more blended yarn I’m looking for. I want the brown to intentionally optically blend with the other colours to help tone them down, rather than stand out on its own, so I won’t be chain-plying the yarns at the wheel this time. Conversely, I’ll be trying to avoid completely mixing the colours together. Hopefully I’ll find the right balance!

Knitted with Blaze yarn that has simply been drafted, spun from the tips and then chain-plied

So, these yarns are going to be a slight deviation from the previous “Questionable Blend” yarns as I’ll be making less of an effort to keep the colours completely separate. It’s all part of my learning journey and I’m taking the scenic route!

All of the yarns in this series will be spun on my Electric Eel Wheel 6 - This is an affiliate link and if you click through and make a purchase I will receive a small percentage of the purchase price at no additional cost to you. Any income from my blog goes a small way towards funding future blog projects.

Spinning Blaze 4 Different Ways

2-ply Spun From the Fold

Spinning from the fold is a simple way of keeping the colours in a multicoloured blended top separate as you are spinning the colours from the side, one after the other, instead of all simultaneously.

So far, all of the yarns in this series have been chain-plied at the wheel, using relatively short chains as this reduces the chances of the colours optically blending together into brown. Chain-plying at the wheel shortens the colour sections down to a third of their original length, and a yarn spun from the fold already has quite short lengths of colour, so the final chain-plied yarn can often be quite busy-looking.

To encourage the brown to mix with the other colours, I’ll be spinning a 2ply yarn this time which should give me longer colour sections but less predictable optical blends.

To spin from the fold I break off a staple length of fibre and fold it over my finger to spin a woollen-style yarn.

Incidentally, I’ve been working on my long-draw spinning recently and this is the perfect fibre preparation to practice with. I’m in no way an expert, but this animated gif shows the technique I prefer. I sit with the wheel to my right and draft sideways with my left hand. My right hand is controlling the amount of twist entering the fibre, allowing me to draw the singles out to the desired thickness.

As I’m aiming for a 2 ply yarn this time, rather than a chain ply, I’m trying to spin a slightly thicker single than for the later 3 yarns I'll be spinning. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough fibre to sample with, and I’m an amateur long-draw spinner, so it’s mostly guess-work at this stage…

The singles spun from the fold are characteristically bright but short.

I went on to wind my singles into a centre-pull ball…

… and then plied the beginning with the end for a zero-waste 2-ply yarn.

This is a true woolen-spun yarn and it's the most obviously airy and textured of all the yarns. I love how much character my amateur long-draw yarn has. It’s so floofy!

Being a 2-ply, rather than chain-plied at the wheel, it's less busy than my previous yarns that were spun from the fold. The slightly thicker singles also means that the colours don't optically blend as much so you still see the individual colours within the plied yarn. It is very pretty!

Knitted up, the yarn spun from the fold is still quite busy but you can definitely see the individual colours shining through.

Splitting the Top Vertically and Pre-Chain-Plying

Blaze is one of the less blended tops in this series so it was really easy to split the top vertically into smaller groups of colour. Also, I wanted the brown to mix with the other colours (which are thankfully close together on the colour wheel) so this was one of the simplest to split vertically.

Once I’d split my 23g of Blaze into smaller sections, I broke each length in half and arranged them in random order ready for spinning.

I kept the lengths quite short, not just because I'm knitting mitred squares, but also because I want to get some marling or barber-poling when I ply it.

The singles have some quite distinct colour banding...

... so, to tone the colours down, I pre-chain-plied the singles into a plying ball using chains that were 5.5 metres long. (There isn't a mathematical reason for this length, it's just how far back I can walk in my kitchen.)

If you'd like to learn more about pre-chain-plying, I wrote a blog post about the two ways to chain-ply here.

Despite the length of the colour sections, I can still see some subtle marling which is very pleasing.

As the 4 colours that makeup Blaze are so similar, this was never going to be a wildly variegated yarn, but just splitting the top up like this adds some interesting colour changes.

Blending Board Rolags - Pre-Chain-Plied

One of my favourite ways of spinning multicolored blends is to turn them into rolags on my blending board. Paradoxically, the blending board allows me to spin a less blended yarn as it enables me to spin the colours from the side rather than the end.

I broke off 3 blending board lengths of top, opened them up, and spread them out across my blending board. In the past, I've done this with 1, 2, or 3 lengths, varying how much each top was opened up and spread out across the board depending on the effect I wanted. I used 3 lengths this time as I wanted the colours to blend together quite a bit more with this fibre.

Once all 3 lengths were in position, I brushed them all down.

I went on to draft off 5 quite thin rolags.

Thinner rolags are not only easier to spin without having to pre-draft them, they also contain shorter lengths of colour - which is what I was aiming for with this yarn.

The singles from this preparation are almost as bright as the ones spun from the fold, but the lengths of colour are quite a bit longer.

Pre-chain-plying this one should hopefully result in a more complex-looking 3-ply yarn with more marling than if I were to chain-ply it at the wheel.

As an aside, I find it interesting to see the affect fibre preparation has on the level of air added to these 3 yarns. Being spun from the end of undrafted rolags, this one has a semi-woolen quality. It's airy and floofy, but not on a level with the first yarn spun from the fold.

Splitting the Colours up on a Blending board and then Dizzing Off

The colours in Blaze are much more distinct and less blended than some of the other Questionable blends so it was an obvious choice for me to separate the colours out a little more on the blending board.

I used masking tape to guide myself on where to place the colours. I intentionally positioned the brown between the red and orange as I wanted the brown to mix with the other hues, and brown/yellow was my least favorite optical blend.

As you can see, I wasn't strict about where the colours were placed. I just tore off thin sections from the side of the top and placed them in whichever section was most dominant.

I've divided up a few multi-coloured tops in the past and this was by far the easiest, mostly because I wasn't worried about the colours mixing together into brown. The brown couldn't get any browner and any colours I added in the wrong place would only add to the complexity. It was quite liberating!

I used the smallest hole in my diz and pulled a kind of variegated top off my blending board, moving from side to side as I worked my way up the board.

The resulting singles gave very distinct bands of colour...

... which I went on to pre-chain-ply with very long chains to tone the colours down and introduce some marling between the colours.

Unsurprisingly, the final yarn has the most distinct colour bands and the longest sections of barber poling.

I have to say, this fibre has been a surprise favourite!

I was worried I wouldn't like my less blended yarns as much as the original blended Blaze yarn (pictured in the centre), but I needn't have been concerned. The plying methods I chose, combined with the analogous colours in the top have resulted in yarns that almost resemble fractal-spun hand-painted top. That makes me very happy!