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.
Tropical
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| Images of Tropical, reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
The 9th blended top in this series is Tropical.
The images of Tropical on the World of Wool website are both very good representations of the colours within it. The one on the left is showing fewer optically blended colours, as if it had been wrapped a little tighter for the photo shoot.
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| Images reproduced by kind permission of World of Wool |
Above are the coloured fibres within Tropical. It's made up of 60% merino and 40% Corriedale which might make it a little better suited to beginner spinners than a 100% merino top.
I originally chose Tropical because it contains colours from all the way around the colour wheel which should result in some interesting optical blends. The 3 slightly more saturated hues are almost primary colours, hopefully making it possible to avoid too many browns or greys if I chain-ply my singles.
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 looking forward to spinning this one. I haven't spun much Corriedale and I'm hopeful that the colours within Tropical will be kind to me.
To begin with, I spun 8g of Tropical 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.
From a distance, the resulting yarn is a mostly dirty blue, grey and purple colour with flecks of pink, orange, yellow and green. It’s not an unattractive yarn but it’s very different to the brightly coloured top I began with.
It looks prettier knitted up but it is still a little dull. From a distance it’s a neutral, optically blended grey with noticeable pops of colour when you take a closer look.
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 Tropical 4 Different Ways
Spinning from the Fold
To spin from the fold I always grab the top at the very tips of the fibre and pull off just a staple length of fibre.
I'm becoming more comfortable with spinning long-draw from the fold and it's now one of my favourite ways of keeping the colours in a blended top slightly separate. It's very relaxing!
The bursts of colour in the singles are usually brighter and shorter than other methods of spinning multicoloured blended top.
When singles that have been spun from the fold are then chain-plied, the final effect can often be busy-looking. This however, is more of a heathered yarn. It looks the most similar to the one that was just drafted and spun from the tips but more of the individual colours are showing through in short bursts.
Of the 4 yarns I spun from Tropical, this was the most understated. It's very pretty but still quite grey from a distance. I can see browns and greys in there, alongside tones of almost all the colours of the rainbow.
It’s worth noting that here, I chain-plied some relatively fine singles to achieve a sport weight yarn to knit alongside the other yarns in this series. If I’d spun the singles a lot thicker and then combined them to spin a 2ply yarn I would have achieved significantly less optical blending and my final yarn would have been much more colourful and less grey from a distance.
Splitting the Top Vertically
Of all the tops I'll be spinning this year, this was one of the easier fibres to split up. It is not overly blended and the colours within it lend themselves well to being split vertically.
I opened the top up as much as possible, trying to get the individual colours to sit next to each other rather than on top of each other.
As I was tearing it up to separate the top into smaller groups of colour, I was careful to avoid colour groupings that would optically blend together into brown. This basically involved ensuring that I didn't have red, yellow and blue within a single fibre nest. I wasn't overly concerned with where the Hyacinth and Aqua fibres were landing as I hoped that the inclusion of these less saturated hues would just tone the final yarn colours down a little.
When I had a table full of little fibre nests I decided to rearrange them so that the colours didn’t clash as I spun through them. I went on to spin them in this order to give me subtle colour transitions in the final yarn.
I love that the different colours within the singles create marling that will add a complexity to the yarn when it is chain-plied.
Arranging the colours in similar hues meant that I had quite long sections of analagous colours together. That orange stripe running through the plied yarn is quite striking!
This method gave me the brightest and most distinct colour sections. It also lends itself well to bigger projects as it’s much more designed than most of the other methods.
I was only working with 23g of fibre so my colour sections are quite short. If I was spinning for a sweater, I would be working from much longer lengths. This opens up the possibility of having narrow or wide random stripes running around the whole of a sweater, or even breaking down a full sweater quantity so that I could have a complete gradient running down the length of the garment. If I were a lover of bold, colourful fashion choices, I would be very tempted…
Personally, I would probably pair this yarn with a dark, neutral to be knitted into a colour changing Fair Isle yoke or decorative stranded colour-work on the base of a sweater. I would love to see that!
Rolling off thin Blending Board Rolags
This is one of my favourite ways to spin a multicoloured blend when I want to avoid the colours blending together too much. I discovered this technique a couple of years ago when I was experimenting with various ways of avoiding spinning mud.
Here, I broke off two sections of top, the length of my blending board. I then opened them up and brushed them down without any drafting at all.
I then rolled off 4 thin rolags. Sometimes I like to draft the fibres out a little first as it makes it easier to roll off thinner rolags. (In this image I’ve broken the final length of top in half, demonstrating that you don’t need 2 full blending board lengths for this technique.)
As the blending board rolags are quite thin, I didn’t need to draft them out at all before spinning, I just spun them from the end as they are.
By turning Tropical into rolags, I’m effectively spinning the top from the side. This brings out the colours more by reducing optical blending.
As the rolags were quite thin, the colour sections in the singles are quite short. If I were to do this again I would probably roll off 3 rolags instead of 4 to make the colour sections that little bit longer.
As the colour sections were quite short, chain-plying still resulted in a lot more optical blends with a real mix of muddy and clean colours. It’s a very wearable yarn with some pretty marling going on.
The colours in this one are similar in brightness and tone to the yarn spun from the fold but as the colour sections are longer there is less optical blending when viewed from a distance. It’s quite an understated yarn and probably the yarn I would choose if I wanted to knit a whole sweater for myself from just one of these yarns. It’s a little more reserved without being dull.
They’re all beautiful yarns and I can imagine a use for every one of them.
Making Blending Board Pencil Roving
To turn Tropical into pencil roving I broke off a single blending board length of top, opened it up until it was the width of my blending board and then brushed it all down.
I then rolled off one big, fat rolag off with no drafting.
Spinning from a dense rolag like this would be no fun at all…
… so I drafted the rolag from the end for a more enjoyable spin. Pre-drafting also reduces the chances of the colours mixing together.
As I’ll be spinning a sport weight, chain-plied yarn I will still need to draft this out quite a bit when I come to spin it.
The colour sections in the singles are quite a bit longer than the previous yarn…
… and the colours are brighter.
The final yarn knits up into a bold, randomly striped mitred square. There are a lot more colours in this yarn that didn’t really show up in the previous yarns and fewer browns and greys.
In a narrow garment, like a sock or thin scarf, the effect would be a pretty stripe. Over a sweater width, where you would have multiple colour changes in a single row, I imagine it could be a little busy looking. Again, it might be very pretty in stranded colourwork, with a dark, neutral background to contrast against but I personally wouldn’t want a whole sweater in this yarn.
I’ve really enjoyed spinning Tropical, with its ever changing colours. And I do love it when all 4 yarns spun from the same fibre blend are distinctly different! It’s so satisfying!
When it comes to fashion choices I’m always much more drawn to the slightly more understated colours but I’m quite the opposite with my spinning fibre choices. Seeing the colours changing on the wheel really holds my attention and makes me very happy. It’s captivating and truly the best kind of colour therapy!
Related Blog 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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