Blending Colors at the Wheel

With the current multitude of fiber arts events and access to fibers on the internet, it is an easy task to find wonderful fibers ready to spin. There are rovings, batts, and tops in a rainbow of colors, both solid and mixed. When I wander the vendor aisles at a fiber festival, I can’t help but purchase fiber. To minimize the effect on my pocketbook, I usually buy small amounts (4 to 8 ounces) of a given fiber, and thus my stash grows. The drawback of this approach is that I often find myself with not enough of a particular fiber to make a large project, such as a sweater.

Early in my spinning life, I had a spinning wheel but few other tools—no handcards, no combs, no drumcarder. Being so minimally equipped, I tried to extend my fiber stash by combining fibers without those tools. My process was simply to predraft two rovings or tops together. The benefits were many—I got greater amounts of yarn for larger projects; I got yarns that were unique because of my blending choices; and the resulting yarns produced very interesting textural effects in my knitting due to various fiber and color blends. Blending at the wheel is a simple way to get interesting results that are not typically found in millspun yarns, and it is also a way of making several different but related yarns for a single project.

In the past couple of years, I have made many blended yarns. The resulting yarns varied and were dependent on several factors:

1. How similar the fiber sources were in coarseness and fiber length
   
2. Whether the fiber sources were combed or carded
   
3. Whether the yarn I made was a singles yarn or plied
   
4. Whether the yarn was thick or thin
   
5. How consistently I blended colors within a single skein
   
6. The contrast or closeness of color hue and value
   
7. The relative percentages of the blended fibers
   

The samples

For all the examples presented, I prepared the fibers before spinning by predrafting. To predraft, I gently pull lengthwise along the roving or top to loosen the fibers and then make the fiber source thinner while maintaining a consistent thickness. All the singles yarns were spun with a Z-twist. All the two-ply yarns were spun Z and plied S. Sometimes I spun on my Reeves upright wheel, sometimes I spun on my Louet S10. I did all the plying on the Louet.

The Thunderstorm colorway blended a light gray roving with a second roving that was a blend of teal blue and black.

Thunderstorm

This yarn was the first that I made by predraft blending. I had two 8-ounce balls of Columbia/Romney carded roving. One was light gray, the other was a blend of teal blue and black. Both fibers were from the same vendor so the rovings were similar in thickness, and the fiber content was essentially the same. I broke off about 2 feet of roving from each of the two sources, held them side by side, and pre-drafted them together as if they were one source. Because I didn’t want a perfectly uniform blend, I tried to ignore how the colors blended as I pre-drafted. I then created a two-ply yarn. Adding the light gray to the already existing blend of blue/black created a yarn that was visually active to me; the contrast of color value of the light gray and darker colors seems to give a sense of motion to the knitted fabric. I ended up with eight skeins of the yarn—enough for a substantive project.

Cinnamon Swirl combined a light-tan roving and a rust-colored roving that had bits of brown.

Cinnamon Swirl

For this yarn, I used two other colors of the Columbia/Romney wool roving. (This is an easy fiber to spin; I use it for teaching beginning spinning. My friend Carol Salerno says it’s like comfort food, so I call it macaroni-and-cheese spinning.) One roving was a light tan and the other a blend of mostly rust with a bit of brown. I only had an ounce or so of the rust fiber but more of the tan. With these two fibers, I created a loosely spun, lopi-style singles yarn, with some variation in yarn thickness throughout. I knew I didn’t have enough fiber to make much yarn, so I decided in advance that I would make only two skeins. Before predrafting, I divided the tan roving into two chunks roughly equal in length. I did the same for the rust. Now I had much more tan than rust. When I predrafted, I started with the tan and randomly added bits of the rust, so that the percentage of tan to rust varied a lot along the length of the yarn. The intermittent spacing of the darker rust fiber against the backdrop of the lighter tan fiber created an interesting visual effect in the resulting yarn and knitted swatch; the swatch makes me think of geological stratification in sandstone. The two skeins were reasonably similar, but not perfectly so.

Conclusion

It is satisfying to get such interesting and unique results from such a simple method. Through my experimentation, I’ve decided that the technique seems to work best when the two blended fiber sources are similar in coarseness, fiber length, and preparation. It also helps to use a scale to weigh the fibers to create yarn that is qualitatively consistent from skein to skein. It was equally easy to use this technique with carded rovings and combed tops; the effects produced in the knitted fabrics varied with value and color contrast, and with relative percentages of the two fiber sources. I found that the color variations were more dramatic in the thick, singles yarns and more subtle in thin and plied yarns.

More of Amy’s samples, clockwise from top left: Teal for Two, Cranberry Freckle, Delft, and Melons Unite

Read the full article to see how Amy created five more samples, including Teal for Two, Cranberry Freckle, Delft, Melons Unite, and Opposites Attract (shown at the top of the article).

Find "Blending Colors at the Wheel" by Amy Tyler in the Spin Off Library.

Amy Tyler lives in the northwest corner of the lower peninsula of Michigan, quite near Lake Michigan. She sometimes visits the upper peninsula to spend some quality time near Lake Superior. She often finds inspiration from Michigan and its lakes for her spinning and knitting creations. Her website is stonesockfibers.com.

Originally published November 9, 2015; updated September 9, 2024