I’ve been writing a blog series over the last couple of years, 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 immediately guess 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 several techniques that can help reduce the amount of optical mixing during spinning, so that some of the original colours still appear in the final yarn. By the end, the tops will almost certainly not be questionable.
Ice and Fire
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| Image of Ice and Fire - Reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
The image of Ice and Fire from the World of Wool website is shown above. In my opinion, the colours aren’t quite as saturated and vibrant in real life as they appear on the World of Wool Website.
… and here are the colours of merino within Ice and Fire.
The other problem with the single image on the World of Wool’s website is that by photographing the fibre tightly wrapped like this, you’re only seeing half the story.
I often open the fibre up before I prepare it, and you can see just how different one side of the top is to the other. It could be two different blends!
Ice and Fire was a really obvious choice for my Questionable Blends blog series, and it was one of the fibre blends that inspired me to start this whole project in the first place. I had no doubt that the bold colours in this blend would blend together into brown if no attempt was made to keep the colours separate. The combinations of orange and blue hues, along with red and slightly green/blues, are a recipe for mud.
I arranged all the yarns from the blends in this series into a kind of muted gradient, and I spun them in this order. These first yarns have all been spun with no attention paid to colour management; they’ve simply been pre-drafted, spun, and then chain-plied.
Honestly, I saved this one until the very end because when I opened it, I wasn't sure how I was going to do this fibre justice. I was worried that I would struggle to spin a yarn that I loved.
Thankfully, after preparing and spinning eleven tricky blends over the last two years, and just allowing myself to play with colour, I've landed on quite a few techniques that should show off the colours in this blend beautifully.
Ice and Fire is one of the least blended tops available, which makes it really versatile. It's so much easier to reduce optical mixing when you have big chunks of colour like this. It's not surprising that Ice and Fire is one of World of Wool's most popular blends.
I should mention that all of the yarns in this series are spun relatively finely and then chain-plied into a sport weight yarn so that I can knit them together into my Questionable Blends Blanket. The finer the singles are spun, the more plies are combined and the more the colours will optically mix together. Ice and Fire would look beautiful core-spun into a thick, chunky yarn and then maybe kept as a single or coil-spun for weaving. Spun chunky, from the tip, and then plied with a single colour chosen from Ice and Fire would also be beautiful and show off the original colours much better than I have in the image below.
To begin with, I spun 8g of Ice and Fire 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.
Of all the yarns I’ve spun in this series, this was the muddiest of them all. Just pre-drafting the fibres and then spinning them worsted style from the end is an excellent way of optically mixing all of those colours together into a heathered, but reserved definite brown. It’s not an unattractive brown, but it’s quite a contrast next to the original boldly coloured top.
Here’s the knitted sample. It’s only when you look a little closer that you see the complex, heathered speckles of blue, orange and red.
All of the Ice and Fire singles were spun on the Nano 2.1 and then plied on the 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 Ice and Fire 4 Different Ways
Spinning from the Fold - Two Ways
I'm spinning all of the yarns in this series from the fold, as this is one of the most popular ways of keeping the colours in a multicoloured top a little more separate.
Over the last two years, I’ve been working on improving my long draw technique, and spinning from the fold is my favourite fibre preparation for learning how to spin a true woollen-spun yarn. It has become muscle memory for me now, and I find it difficult not to automatically spin from the fold using a long-draw technique.
If you’ve followed my Questionable Blends blog series from the beginning, you will know that I began, however, spinning from the fold using a short-draw technique. I wondered if worsted drafting, a method that controls the fibres much more, results in a yarn with more colour definition. Ice and Fire, with its bold chunks of colour, is the perfect fibre to test this theory.
I begin both methods of spinning from the fold by breaking off just a staple length of fibre and wrapping it over my index finger.
You can see that with a worsted-style short draft, the fibres are still well under control. I'm barely allowing the twist to enter my fibre supply, so the colours take their turn to be spun as they shuffle gently along my finger.
With a long, woollen draft, the twist is allowed to enter the fibre supply, so I don't have the same level of control over the colours entering the twist zone. The chances of two, three, or more colours being spun together at the same time seems to increase with a woollen spun yarn, so maybe there is a higher incidence of optical mixing when you spin long-draw from the fold?
Here are the singles spun short-draw. The colour sections are short, as is usual when you spin from the fold, but the colours are still relatively well-defined. Although there’s quite a bit of marling, I can still see some clean oranges and reds in there, alongside optical mixes of pastel blue, grey, burgundy, and brown.
Here’s the woollen-spun single, spun from the fold. There are far fewer clean oranges and reds in there, and the colours are generally duller as there is a lot more optical mixing. It may be that I still need to work on my long draw technique, but the woollen-spun single is fuzzier, less smooth, and the single is less uniform in diameter - all factors that make the colours in the woollen-spun single less vibrant than the short-drafted single.
After chain plying, there seems to be only a very slight difference between the yarn spun short draw (on the left) and the yarn spun long draw (on the right).
At first glance, the colours might be a little duller and muddier, but there’s not an awful lot in it.
The oranges and aqua colours are a little cleaner on the yarn spun with a short draft…
… but from a distance, they’re both pretty brown. Pleasingly, both of the yarns evened out after chain-plying, and yet they both have imperfections that maintain the characteristics of handspun yarn.
After knitting them up, the difference is very slight. There does seem to be a little less optical mixing in the one spun short draw, and the colours are a little brighter. There are more oranges and reds in the one spun short draw, and, as the colour sections are shorter, it is slightly busier, but I'm being very analytical here. Both are very similar, and, from a distance, I probably could not tell them apart.
Splitting the Top Vertically
This is one of the most popular methods of avoiding ‘spinning mud’ when you have a contrasting coloured blend like this one.
Thankfully, Ice and Fire is one of the easiest blends to split as it hasn’t been through the gilling machine many times to reduce and multiply the individual colours. With some of the other blends, I was having to tear them into tiny strips to avoid muddy optical mixes, but Ice and Fire, with its thicker colour sections, was a breeze!
I separated it out into colour groups that were unlikely to blend together into grey or brown. So I avoided high proportions of blue and orange together and tried not to combine the red with colours that would mix together into green.
I then arranged my nests into a kind of mirror gradient, and I spun them in this order.
I love this technique as it’s probably the simplest way of avoiding all of the colours mixing together into mud. I’m able to control the length of the colour sections, the order of the colours, and the level of muddiness carried through into the final yarn. It feels so much more designed than a lot of the other methods I’ve tried in the past.
The final chain-plied yarn has the heathered look of a blended yarn, but with colour changes that, at first glance, are more reminiscent of yarn spun from hand-painted top. I would definitely wear this as an accent colour against a neutral background in a stranded colourwork sweater.
The colour sections here are relatively short as I was knitting mitred squares. If I began with a much longer length, it would be a little harder to manage, but it would allow me to prepare lengths of colour better suited to a sweater knit. It's very wearable!
Intentional Optical Mixing on a Blending Board
Ice and Fire, with its bold, lightly blended, contrasting colours is the perfect top to experiment with my technique of Intentional Optical Mixing on a Blending Board.
For this technique, I create a template to sit at the head of my blending board; the design varies each time, depending on how I want the different colours to interact with each other.
This was the template I created for preparing Ice and Fire. The colour order was influenced by my desire to avoid the orange of Clementine optically mixing too much with the Duck Egg blue colour combination.
I broke off 3 blending board lengths of top and then tore off thin strips to place them on the corresponding section of the blending board. As you can see, I wasn’t overly strict about keeping the colours completely separate. A few colours in the wrong place only add to the complexity, and a little bit of muddiness was quite desirable.
I brushed the board down every time it was fully covered in fibre. It took about half an hour to separate out all of the colours like this, which is quite a lot less than the previous times I've tried this technique.
As I wanted lots of variegation and smooth transitions between each colour, I dizzed the fibre off my blending board. I’m a worsted spinner at heart, so this is one of my favourite fibre preparations to spin from.
You can really see the controlled mix of colours throughout the roving, which should give me a lovely heathered yarn.
The final chain-plied yarn is complex and heathered, but with lots of repeating colour changes throughout the whole yarn.
Zigzagging the Blending Board Batt
Originally, I was going to stop there, but when I knitted up the last yarn, I realised how short the colour sections were and became curious to see how it would look with much longer colour repeats. I also need to spin some more yarn to finish my Questionable Blends Blanket.
… but this time, I rolled the whole lot off in one blending board batt.
I zig-zag stripped the batt into thin strips to allow the full length of the gradient to show through.
I then drafted the whole batt out into one continuous roving, taking extra care at the top and bottom to rotate the fibres, trying to keep them as parallel as possible.
I repeated the whole process to create a mirror gradient, which could be repeated along the length of the yarn for a larger garment.
This was such a satisfying spin, and the longer gradient will be much better suited to a slightly wider knit.
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Thank you so much to all the spinners who've followed along with me in this blog series! It's taken three years instead of the one year I originally planned, but I've learned so much along the way. I've added a few more techniques to my fibre preparation repertoire, which makes me want to revisit my Spinning into Focus blog series again... I've fallen down a very deep but joyful, meandering rabbit hole that I plan to continue to explore as far as it will take me.
This was the last World of Wool Questionable Blend in this blog series, but it's not the last time you'll see me spinning Ice and Fire. The bold chunks of colour make it the ideal fibre to demonstrate how I turn multicoloured blends like this into a fractal yarn.
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| Questionable Blend #11 Twinkle Twinkle |
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