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 several 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.
Hawaiian Dreams by Lee
Unfortunately, this blend was a 2023 World of Wool Team Member special, so it is now discontinued. As of October 2024, it is still available at a discounted price, and the remaining stock can be found here.
If you particularly love this blend but it's no longer available, you could still ask World of Wool to build this blend for you using their custom blend maker service.
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| Images of Hawaiian Dreams - Reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
The images of Hawaiian Dreams on the World of Wool website are both fairly good representations of the colours within it but it’s a little less dark and moody in real life.
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| Images reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
Above are the colours of the merino fibres within Hawaiian Dreams.
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| My photograph of Hawaiian Dreams with the top opened up |
I feel like the amount of yellow within this blend isn’t properly illustrated on the World of Wool website. By photographing the top tightly wound like this, it’s easy for the outer colours to hide away some of the inner hues.
I originally chose Hawaiian Dreams as I was drawn to the beautiful purples within it and intrigued by how these would play against the yellow. I could also see that it contained some quite saturated almost primary colours which should make for some exciting optical blends.
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.
I'm really looking forward to spinning this one. The colours aren’t overly blended and it contains bright colours from all the way around the colour wheel - this should be a fun spin!
To begin with, I spun 8g of Hawaiian Dreams 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.
The resulting yarn is a very pretty tonal purple. It always pleases me when the colours blend together into a hue that I would happily wear. It makes me hopeful that however I decide to spin it, I’m unlikely to be disappointed.
From a distance, the colours optically blend into a dull purple but when you take a closer look you can still see pops of bright colours from all the way around the colour wheel.
Most 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 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 Hawaiian Dreams 4 Different Ways
Spinning from the Fold
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 little bit 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.
I'm still practicing my long-draw technique and I'm really noticing the difference between spinning 100% merino and the Corriedale blend that I spun last month. The latter drafted from the fold much more easily - but I still prefer merino for its neck-soft qualities.
When it’s chain plied, those short lengths of colour give me a heavily marled yarn. It has a tweedy look to it but, on closer inspection, it's a riot of multicoloured pops of colour...
From a distance, the final knitted fabric optically blends into a mostly purple with splashes of yellow, green and orange to add surface interest. It's very pretty.
Splitting the Top Vertically
This is one of the simplest and most popular methods of avoiding the colours mixing together in a vertical blend. It's really effective and requires no special tools.
I first open the top up so that the colours mostly sit next to each other rather than on top of each other.
Then I tear strips off the side, trying to avoid colour combinations that will mix together into brown. Pleasingly, Hawaiian Dreams is one of the less blended tops so my strips are still a nice thickness to spin from.
I then set about arranging my little nests of fibre into a kind of spectrum order.
This time, I decided to switch things up a little to give me some contrast between the different colour selections. I split my spectrum in half and then alternated the second half of the spectrum with the first half of the spectrum. Hopefully, the image above gives you a clearer visual illustration of how I organised my fibre.
At this point, I was starting to regret my decision not to just spin the nests of fibre in spectrum order...
Chain-plying gave me quite a contrasting yarn with some very distinct colour changes.
I think it may have been a mistake to take such a laissez-faire approach to the order that I spun my nests of fibre. The colours in the first square are tonally similar, while the colours in the 3rd square are clashing with each other. It might be an interesting approach to take if I was dividing up a less contrasting blend but I would definitely take a more considered approach if I were to spin this again.
Rolags on a Blending Board
This is one of my favourite methods of preparing a vertically blended top as it gives an interesting level of colour variation without being too bold or stripey.
This time I just broke off two lengths of top that were the length of my blending board, opened them up and then brushed them down.
I went on to draft off 3 relatively thin rolags from my blending board. I find thinner rolags are easier to spin from without needing to be pre-drafted and they usually result in more distinct colour sections.
The single looks quite similar to the one spun from the fold but the colour sections are slightly longer.
The final chain-plied yarn has a little less barber poling than the one spun from the fold and the colours are slightly brighter, but it’s quite similar.
When it’s knitted up, the individual colours stand out a little more making quite busy for my reserved self. I don’t think I would want a whole sweater in this but I’d love to see it woven into a scarf or as a linen stitch cowl. That could be very pretty…
Intentional Optical Blending on a Blending Board
For my final yarn, I wanted to create a yarn that not only showed off the beautiful combination of colours within Hawaiian Dreams but also demonstrated some of the prettier optical blends that could be possible if I separated the colours out intentionally.
As a caveat, I should say that this is a very labour-intensive technique, and I would never buy a multicoloured top with the sole intention of separating out all the colours, but it is an interesting colour experiment to carry out when I have just 22 grams of multicoloured fibre to play with.
Intentional optical blending on a blending board is a technique I came up with last year and it's just a simple way of planning and mapping out the colour arrangements on a blending board so that colours overlap pleasingly to mix together into clean secondary or tertiary spectrum colours rather than blending together into brown or grey.
There is a lot of yellow in Hawaiian Dreams and, as it's my least favourite colour, I wanted to place this centrally on my blending board so that I could get it to mix with both the raspberry pink and the spearmint blue on either side. Placing the yellow colours centrally helped to dictate where the other colours fell on the blending board as they were simply placed in spectrum order to avoid any brown/grey combinations.
I printed out this colour template and taped it to the top of my blending board to help guide where I placed the colours. However, when I came to loading the coloured strips of fibre, I realised that the spearmint section was too long, and the violet section was too short. Serendipitously, it meant that I needed to start adding violet fibres onto the far end of the spearmint section which optically blended together into a pretty blue colour. I do love a happy accident!
I broke my top up into 3 lengths that were just a bit longer than my blending board. I then opened them up to make it easier to see the individual colours within the top.
Here’s my blending board after I separated out the third section of top. I then brushed it all firmly down again.
Hopefully you can see that I wasn’t overly strict about avoiding placing thin sections of colour in the wrong sections but it all adds to the complexity.
Having made a rainbow batt, it seemed a shame not to get as much length out of the colours as possible, so I removed the whole thing from my blending board….
…I then zig-zag split the batt into thin sections, trying to separate it at points that would give me further optical blends.
I drafted the whole thing out, concentrating on those turned corners to try to get all the fibres facing in the same direction as much as possible.
Spinning rainbow singles is so much fun!
And the resulting chain-plied yarn is strikingly colourful, while still having the complexity of yarn made up of optically blended colours.
As I only had 22g to work with, this rainbow yarn is only really suited to the narrowest of garments. If I had larger quantities of each colour, I can see how I could split the rainbow over several blending board batts to create a much more usable rainbow yarn… maybe that’s yet another project for another day!
I do love a colourful spin and it’s very satisfying when I can clearly see the difference between the 4 yarns.
Related Posts
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| Spinning 12 Questionable Blends |
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| Questionable Blend #1 Higglety Pigglety |
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| Questionable Blend #2 Over the Rainbow |
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| Questionable Blend #3 Gourami |
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| Questionable Blend #4 Rainbow |
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