Spinning with Color

One of the hardest things to learn about buying fiber for spinning is that, no matter how pretty the fiber colors are, it will not look like that when it is spun.

Unless you are doing a gradient of some kind, the colors will mix and mingle as you spin them. You get this a bit with knitting variegated yarns, but less so - for the most part, the colors never "run" together like a bad watercolor.

Now, maybe I am just inexperienced, and, if I knew what I was doing I could get clean, clear color transitions. But I think that it is more than a matter of technique. If I want that kind of yarn, I need to dye it after I spin it.

So, for instance, if I buy wool that looks like this:

Yellow wool from Little Barn

The final yarn will be much more uniform, with almost no variation across the yarn:

An early yarn made on my wheel, 2-ply

There is a depth of color, but the shading that I really enjoyed in the fiber just isn't there in the final yarn.

Sometimes, the colors I get are completely unexpected though:

Jacob roving from Blue Flower Flock

I thought that this would come out mostly white, with a bit of gray tinge. Nope! I got a nice, dark tweed.

Three-ply Jacob skein

And finally, the spinning project that inspired this post. I took a batt of dyed coopworth and spinnoodled (this is now a thing) a small skein this week. I could tell that the locks had been partially felted when they were dyed, and the drum carder had difficulty in making a usable batt. But the colors were really interesting:

Rough coopworth batt from Blue Moon Fiber Arts

Maybe I just don't know how to handle this kind of stripey fiber, but it came out really weirdly blended:

2-ply skein on the niddy-noddy

Maybe it is just me, but the colors don't seem to match at all with what I started with.

Here is a close-up:

Well, it is interesting. I don't know what I will make with it. Maybe I will only spin from uniform colors in the future, and leave variegated yarns to the dye vat.