It's.... Complicated

So, at Stringtopia I got a little help trying to get outside my comfort zone. I won't lie. I love pink. Red. Burgundy. I love the color group red from the deepest, darkest burgundy to the palest blush. Clothes in my closet coordinate not because I buy them at the same time, but because I love the same shades so consistently that they wind up matching. Unfortunately, that means that I have a really hard time picking out any other colors that aren't pink.

While I was there, the lovely women helped me out of my color rut. Morgaine of Carolina Homespun had her amazing array of fibers up on display. Liz helped me pick out a green to go with the purple cashmere silk from Spirit Trail Fiberworks. And everyone kept raving about the book, Color in Spinning, by Deb Menz. So I picked it up and a bunch of fibers to use with the exercises in the book.

Quite a bit of the book is about fiber preparation, which I can totally understand as a spinner. Not to mention, it totally cements my desire for a drum carder and combs. Chapter upon chapter tempts me with new hobbies and supplies. But for now, I'm focused on her techniques for selecting and combining colors. I picked up a batt, from Diane of Schafenfreude Fibers and then began to raid my stash to find the right colors to compliment the batt. Here's what I have so far:



Each little mini skein is only a few yards long, and has one ply from the glorious abalone-inspired batt. The mini skeins are 3-ply yarns that are lace weight. I purposely spun tiny yarns to take advantage of how the eye will blend colors too small for it to separate out. I'm completely fascinated by how colors are perceived by the human eye and how that changes when the details are too small to separate visually. These are the fibers used to make each skein.



The fibers on the left are from Ashland Bay's 70% merino, 30% silk blend that I purchased from SlimChicken's Etsy Shop. The front color is sandstone while the darker one is pewter. The fibers on the right include a batt that I made under Abby's tutelage at Stringtopia. The purple fiber on the right is a 50% merino, 25% Silk, 25% Bamboo blend from Von Strohm's Booth at Knitter's Connection. I was trying to pick colors that played off the iridescent shimmer of blue and green colors in the batt. What's got me hooked is how much those colors change when placed on a different background.

We'll start with a simple white background. All pictures were taken in my kitchen, with the same camera, with the same muted flash.



But when you put the same skeins on a black background, they change significantly.



Suddenly, the purple comes out more in the skein on the right, while the white shows much more vividly in the skein on the left. Naturally, I couldn't stop there and had to see what happens when I tried different colors.



On a purple background, the skein on the right lost its bright blue-purple tone. The dark grey and burgundy brown plies became more dominant and the skein grew more muted. It felt like the opposite happened with the skein on the left, where the blue and green tones came out more strongly. Curious, I had to know what happened when I put them on a green background.



The blue and purple tones came back out again! Something I don't quite understand happened with the comparative brightness of the skeins. You'll have to forgive me, I'm just learning to discern values and contrast - this is nothing like art class. Colors don't mix purely like they do with paint. Last, but not least, I had to see what happened to the skeins on a red background (You had to know that was coming).



To me, it feels like the clearest brightness value change shows up best in this last picture. My friend was telling me about how quilters have this tool that they use to judge relative values in different quilt blocks. The tool is a simple red film placed over different fabrics and reduces them to a comparative grey scale. I imagine it would work something like this, where it's clear how much lighter the skein on the left is than the one on the right.

While I haven't arrived on the perfect combination of colors to use on the abalone batt, I've had a really fun time exploring colors. I've purchased several more fiber sample kits from SlimChicken's shop so that I can practice blending larger skeins. Each skein will get knit into a Ten Stitch Blanket that I can keep at work. I'm determined to learn to appreciate and select other colors, and I'm going to have a ton of fun along the way.

Why predraft?

No, this has nothing to do with pre-gaming or tail-gating or anything alcoholic, really.

It's about drafting before one spins. I mean, why do it? I'm firmly of the belief that a well-prepared fiber does not need drafting to spin it. A well-prepared, non-compacted fiber should not need to be pre-drafted before spinning. We all know how well the mail carriers treat packages, right? Every parcel is sacred and uncrushed, lovingly carried along for the journey, and hand-delivered to the doorstep of one's home.

Yeah, I hear your derisive laughter now.

Parcel abuse is just one of the reasons why I would choose to pre-draft. Compaction while dyeing happens. Fibers might have drastically different lengths (which might be something I discuss later). There's a number of good reasons why a person would need to pre-draft, or fluff up, or tear into their fiber before the act of spinning it. That said, the following picture tutorial isn't about tearing up all the roving into itty-bitty strips that are ready to feed into the wheel, ready to go. It's about how I managed the fibers to get the yarn I wanted, and that required a little extra step called pre-drafting.

Please examine Exibit A:


It's a lovely, lovely batt I got from my swap partner. It's a blend of merino and angora, percentages unknown. Before this batt, the only other batts batt I'd ever spun was an AbbyBatt. (Side note: Abby Batts are prepared by none other than Abby Franquemont herself, and are painstakingly prepared, and glorious to spin. That is, to say, they don't need predrafting. If that first link doesn't work, Carolina Homespun and The Spinning Loft carry Abby Batts, usually at different time and of different types. If you've never spun from a batt before, I highly recommend an Abby batt, because they are so well-prepared and well-blended. But enough digressing!)

As you can see from Exhibit A, the batt is quite unlike commercial top, commonly called roving. The fibers do not all lie parallel and the fibers themselves aren't well mixed. You can see the lighter stripes of angora contrasting with the merino and the thicker stripes of merino pop out as a darker pink. I started out by tearing a strip from one side of the batt, because I didn't want a giant pink blanket of fiber sitting in my lap while I spun. Then, I began to pre-draft one end of the strip.

Exhibit B:

If you look closely at the end of the strip farthest away from the hinges, you'll notice that it's thinner than the rest of the strip. You can see the color of the wooden table top peeking through the fibers. That's because I pre-drafted it, or attenuated the fibers so they aren't so closely clumped together. I pulled it apart from side to side - pulling a little bit in the spindle direction, tugging a bit in the ruler's direction. Then, I grabbed a hold of the end and began gently yanking away a small tuft from the hinges. (Hey, items in pictures make good directional references. Wasn't that easier to see than if I said left, right, up and down?) That said, I never pulled the fiber hard enough so that it separated into clumps. That's not what I wanted, I just wanted the fibers loose and fluffy so they'd draft a little more easily. Once I'd drafted 3 to 6 inches of one end of the strip, it was ready to join.



With the thin end of the strip next to the loose end of my single, I was ready to spin the two together. Holding the tip of the strip to the single, I pulled out an even thinner tuft of fiber from the strip to spin with the single and started my wheel. You can see in the next picture how much thinner I pulled out the tip and how much it overlaps with the unspun end of the single. The blue arrow points out the loose end of the single.



Holding the two ends together, I continued to treadle slowly on my wheel and build up some twist in the space between the wheel and my fingers. Once that was done, I pulled my pinched fingers back so that the twist traveled into the section that held fibers from both the tufted end of the strip and the unspun end of the single. It makes for a nice, smooth join as you can see in the next photo.



While I'm spinning, I'm drafting the fiber out as well but never so much that the fibers pull apart. You can check out this photo and the following photo to see how (not) far apart my hands usually go when I'm spinning. That said, I used a combination of supported long draw and short foward draw. Every once in a while, I'd need to stop to do some predrafting.



Yes, that's a bit of a jumbled mess, isn't it? I'm very used to spinning from top, which has parallel fibers, so I've been using drafting as a method to pull the fibers into an alignment that's easier for me to spin. Once again, I'm pulling from the tip out towards the wheel. I pinched the fibers right around where the blue arrow is pointing and pulled the fiber towards the wheel, like so -



From there, I continued to smooth down the tips as they got spun into the single, pulling backwards with my fiber hand to draft as I spun. Sometimes my fiber-holding hand gets uppity and does the drafting job that my fiber-management hand is supposed to do. As you can see, my fiber-management hand was busy smoothing out the crumpled fiber into the single.



That said, the rest of the spinning was a rinse and repeat of these steps. Once I reached the end of the strip I was spinning, I'd tear out another one and start over. I hope the pictures helped other people figure out how to spin batts. Who knew that violin playing made for great practice at holding cameras at odd angles?

Things I don't understand

This is a list which is unfortunately growing. Quantum mechanics will always be on top of that list, but lately, there are a few other things adding themselves to that list. Like spinning pencil roving. I was having the most difficult time spinning my first ounce of pencil roving. I had gotten a hank of it from Fibresphere in Alexandria, VA when I was on a business trip in DC. Glorious colors dyed by Miss Babs in green and purple in a 50/50 merino/tencel blend (MerSea #16). It's a well prepared batch, dyed with two strands of roving next to each other so you don't have to worry about matching roving for stripes. I split the hank into 2 oz, and then separated one set of strands from eachother. This more or less gave me 1 oz pencil roving strands to spin, and I set back for what I thought would be an easy spin.

How wrong I was! I swear, I've never had a fiber break on me so many damn times! I'm sure part of it is because it's a completely new blend for me to use. I was using one of my lightest spindles, 3/4 of an oz, and still it was breaking all the time! I expected part of it towards the end, because I was spinning fairly fine and the spindle was getting fairly heavy. So I expected more of the same suffering when I got to the second oz. Wouldn't you know, that damn thing is spinning beautifully? I want to know what fiber fairies came in and replaced my roving with something that behaves better.

Tour de Fleece

So.

I've decided to commit to Tour de Fleece, a Ravelry hosted event that corresponds to Tour de France. Every day they spin, is a day we spin. As spinners. Who make yarn.

You didn't really think I was going to bike ride for 100+ miles, did you?

Anyways, I'm going to do some goal setting, just to make myself accountable. I want to spin at least 8 oz, which can occur in any combination of the following projects.

4 oz - 70% merino, 15% silk, 15% firestar pink roving. I started it in May, and it's languishing, because I got distracted. It's something that happens more often than I can remember. So I want to finish this yarn, in a 2 ply, at sport weight. Don't ask me what I want to make from it, because I have no idea.

Franquemont Fiber - So, my very, very wonderful friends have donated their samples to me (we were all very luck to receive an Abby batt sample at a teaching event). I've spun about 0.75 oz so far, and I should have an oz or less to spin. It would go very quickly, except... all of my spindles are full.

8 oz - 75% BFL, 25% Silk. I bought this roving, hoping I'd have enough to make a sweater. I only need 600-700 yds of dk weight yarn. Here's wistfully hoping!

Honestly, if I spun just 8 oz from all of this, I'd be really happy. Oh, did I forget to mention, I'm spinning all of this on a spindle?