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.
Hickory Dickory
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| Images of Hickory Dickory reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
The 8th blended top in this series is Hickory Dickory.
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| Images reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
Above are the fibres within Hickory Dickory. The first 3 colours are merino wool but 15% of it is dark green bamboo fibre which should add a little more sheen to the final yarn.
I chose Hickory Dickory as those pinks and greens will definitely result in some muddy combinations.
It's also one of the more blended tops, so keeping those colours slightly separate will be tricky.
The image of Hickory Dickory on the World of Wool website isn't a bad representation of its true colour, but the hues appear a little less saturated on the website. The pink is a little more dominant in person and, as its name suggests, much more of a Barbie pink.
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.
Of all the Questionable Blends I'll be spinning this year, this was one of two that gave me the most reason to deliberate and mull over the best ways to spin it. I love pink and green together, but this one feels like it will be very tricky to avoid the colours optically blending into sludge.
To begin, I spun 8g of Hickory Dickory 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 was a muddy mix of peach and green with very little evidence of Barbie pink.
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| Knitted with Hickory Dickory that has just been pre-drafted, spun from the tips and then chain-plied |
Interestingly, the knitted sample shows a lot more variegation than most of the other yarns spun this way. I suspect that pre-drafting it gave me long sections that didn’t contain the shorter bamboo fibres and then sections that contained all 4 colours. The pink has been almost completely optically blended away.
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 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 Hickory Dickory 4 Different Ways
Spinning from the Fold
Spinning from the fold is the perfect technique for practicing my long-draw technique and I'm gradually getting better at spinning a fine woolen yarn. I don't think I'll ever be a high-speed long draw spinner, but I do find this long, slow draft very relaxing.
When you spin from the fold you are spinning the colours from the side so you are drafting from a reduced number of colours which allows some of the individual colours to show through.
The singles spun from the fold are characteristically speckled with a lot of the colours of the original blended top.
Chain-plying singles that have been spun from the fold always results in lots of short colour sections but it is the best way of trying to get some of those colours to 'pop'.
The final knitted sample looks quite muddy from a distance but when you take a closer look you can still see a heathered yarn dotted with pink and green.
Split Vertically
The singles spun from the fold are characteristically speckled with a lot of the colours of the original blended top.
Chain-plying singles that have been spun from the fold always results in lots of short colour sections but it is the best way of trying to get some of those colours to 'pop'.
The final knitted sample looks quite muddy from a distance but when you take a closer look you can still see a heathered yarn dotted with pink and green.
Spinning from the fold and splitting the top vertically are the two most popular methods employed by spinners to avoid 'spinning mud' so I'm using these two techniques for every blend in this series.
When you tear off strips from the side of the top you are reducing the number of colours that will optically blend together and you create a much more variegated yarn.
As Hickory Dickory is well blended I had to tear off very thin strips of top if I wanted to spin a yarn with distinct colour changes and avoid it all just optically blending together.
Once I'd rolled all of my lengths of top into little nests, I then rearranged them so that I was spinning from a different set of colours with each following nest.
Pleasingly, the singles are showing quite distinct bands of green and pink.
These distinct colour changes showed up as pretty bands of colour in my mitred squares. Of the 4 methods I employed this time, this technique is the most designed. I was able to choose the order and arrangement that I spun them in, and if I'd been spinning for a sweater quantity, I would have been able to spin from much longer lengths so that the bands of colour could carry around the body or sleeve. It's very simple and effective.
Combed Gradient
As Hickory Dickory contains a small amount of dark green bamboo fibres, I was intrigued to see the effect I would get if I combed a little with my mini wool combs. I find that bamboo fibres are generally shorter than merino fibres and much more uniform in length, so when I place a merino/bamboo blend on my combs or hackle I'm usually able to draft off a gradient.
This animated gif shows that in the beginning, the longer merino fibres blend together into a subtle peach colour as there are very few dark green bamboo fibres drafted off the tips of the fibre. As I move towards the tines of my combs, the colour starts to turn muddier and greener as the shorter bamboo fibres come into play.
I blended 4 little nests of fibre and arranged than so that I could alternate the end that I spun each one from.
The singles spun from a combed gradient gave me the most striking colour range, going from a clean, peach, through to a muddy green and sections that are almost grey.
The pink has completely disappeared...
... and I'm left with an interesting repeating gradient yarn. I can't say that I love this colour combination but it definitely adds some visual interest to my Questionable Blends blanket. My mini wool combs only hold about 6 grams of fibre but this technique would also work on a hackle to draft off a sweater quantity of gradient pulled top.
Blending Board Pencil Roving
The pink has completely disappeared...
... and I'm left with an interesting repeating gradient yarn. I can't say that I love this colour combination but it definitely adds some visual interest to my Questionable Blends blanket. My mini wool combs only hold about 6 grams of fibre but this technique would also work on a hackle to draft off a sweater quantity of gradient pulled top.
I developed this method when I was writing my Spinning into Focus blog series and it's one of the easiest ways of making variegated pencil roving using a blending board.
When a top is as blended as this one, I break off just one section that is the length of my blending board, open it up, and stretch the single piece of blended top over the whole of my blending board. This way the colours are far more likely to be next to each other rather than on top of one another and I tend to get cleaner colours.
Without drafting, I roll the whole lot off my blending board in one big, thick rolag.
As it would not be fun to spin from such a thick rolag, I then draft it thinly from the end into a kind of pencil roving.
You can see that this gives me a thin roving with a much more reduced number of colours along its width.
The singles have a lot more variegation but the lengths of colour are not as long as the one split vertically.
The colour sections are just as clean, if not cleaner than the one split vertically. The transitions between each colour are smoother and more fluid but the lengths of colour are much shorter. I would use this method if I wanted a more random mix of colour as there is no way of controlling the arrangement and length of colour sections with this method.
Honestly, I really struggled to motivate myself to spin this blended top as I knew that any yarn I spun from it would be pretty sludgy. I hope I've managed to do it justice and Hickory Dickory is now a little less questionable.
Other Blog Posts in this Series -
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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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| Questionable Blend #9 Tropical |
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