If you want to control how color shows up in your hand-spun yarns, there's one thing that you must understand. Fortunately, it's the subject of today's episode. Hello there, darling Sheepspotter. Welcome to episode 129 of the Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love. Today, we are going to talk about optical mixing.
What is optical mixing, you ask? Well, the brain, when it sees two hues close together, two colors close together, it will kind of mush them together, and it will see them as a blend of the two. So, for example, if you make little dots of blue and put them next to little dots of yellow, your brain will perceive them as green. And the smaller the dots and the farther away you are from them, the stronger the optical mixing will be. You will see a color that isn't actually present.
Have you ever had the experience of spinning up a brilliantly colored braid of hand-dyed fiber from your favorite dyer and ending up with a yarn that looks dull and muddy? Optical mixing is why that happens. Or have you ever blended two solid color fibers together, and that could be naturally colored fibers or dyed fibers. Up close, you can see the two individual colors clearly, but from a distance, the fiber looks like it was dyed with a dye that is a mix of the two colors.
Optical mixing is why that happens. It's crucial to understand that optically mixed colors can appear more vibrant than physically mixed colors or admixed colors. Admixing is the physical mixing of pigments, and generally it will dull the original colors some. But in optical mixes, the original colors retain their intensity and their brightness.
Optical mixing is how painting techniques like pointillism create the impression of rich, complex colors in works like Surat's A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And understanding optical mixing is crucial to understanding how color works in spinning. So, when we spin colored fiber, we are in effect creating long, slender lines of color. The finer the yarn, the thinner the lines of color.
And when we take that slender line of color and we ply it with another different line of color, we've created the perfect conditions for optical mixing. We've got adjacent little dots of color. So this brings me to my first adage about optical mixing. And that is that when you ply multicolored fiber, you are in effect mixing the colors. So to ply is to mix. Repeat after me. To ply is to mix.
So the first adage means that the same rules apply when plying as would apply if you were physically mixing a medium-like paint. This is the reason that you can start with a very brightly colored braid and end up with quite a dull yarn. If you pick a bright color and you ply it with its complement, its complement is the opposite color on the color wheel, the result is going to read from a distance as a kind of muddy neutral because of optical mixing.
And indeed, any time you ply together two singles that together encompass all three primaries, cyan, magenta, and yellow, or blue, red, and yellow, the result is going to read from a distance as a muddy neutral. Finally, any time you're applying a color and a neutral, that will also have the effect of desaturating the colors in your yarn. So these are the things to be aware of. These are things that you have to be aware of when you're selecting multicolored braids and planning how to spin them.
Remember that the smaller the dots of color you can see the more your brain will smush those colors together and that's the technical term smush or in other words the more optical mixing there will be and this means that yarns plied from finer singles will produce more optical mixing than yarns made from plying thicker singles. So thinner singles equal more optical mixing, thicker singles equals less. And that's our second adage of optical mixing, the diameter of your singles really matters.
Now, on to the third adage, and that is that ply structure really matters too. The ply structure you choose will have a big impact on optical mixing in your yarns when you're spinning multicolored braids. In a two-ply yarn, you'll have, at most, two colors next to each other. And every time you add a ply, you're, in effect, adding another color. So in a three-ply, you'll have as many as three colors, and in a four-ply, you'll have as many as four.
With three or four colors appearing at any one spot in your yarn, the chances increase that your eye will perceive all three primaries, or colors that contain all three primaries, in close proximity to each other, and the colors will optically mix to a muddy neutral. So, if to mix is to ply, then the more plies you have, the more mixing you will get, and the more desaturated your yarn will appear from a distance.
Which brings me to my fourth adage about optical mixing in hand-spun yarns, and that is that distance matters as well. It's easy for us to think that the colors in our hand spun will look brighter than they actually will because when we're spinning and working with our yarns, we're so physically close to them. They're usually less than a foot away from us during those processes. But that's not really the way we and others are going to see that yarn or the
cloth we create from it in the real world. Other people, especially, will see that cloth from farther away. And because optical mixing increases with distance, it's important to get some distance from your own yarn and cloth to really get a true sense of how the color will read. So in this episode, I've defined optical mixing and explained why it's so important to understand when blending colors during fiber preparation or when spinning a multicolored fiber that's going to be plied.
And I've given you four adages to keep in mind about optical mixing. Number one, to mix. To ply is to mix. To ply is to mix. Number two, the diameter of your singles will impact the degree of optical mixing in your yarn and cloth with thinner singles creating more optical mixing and thicker ones creating less. Number three, more plies means more blending.
And number four, you need to step away from your yarn and your cloth to fully appreciate the effects of optical mixing, which increases as the distance between the object and the observer increases.
So that is it for me this week darling sheep spotter thank you so much for listening i really hope this episode will help you create the color effects that you want in your hand spun yarns and in the cloth that you make from your hand spun yarns i would love to know what you thought of this episode and i invite you to comment on and discuss it with other sheep spotters in the flock There is a link to a discussion thread dedicated to this episode in your show notes,
which you will find right inside your podcast app. Now, there is much more to be said about this topic, so I'm going to be back next week with more on optical mixing and a color management rubric I call the Continuum of Blendiness, which will help you really dial in how color shows up in your yarns and what it looks like when you're working with multicolored braids.
In that episode, I'm also going to talk about the different color management techniques, the different ways of spinning color that you might choose to get particular color effects. So you definitely don't want to miss that episode. And while you're waiting, I strongly suggest that you spin something. I'm pretty sure it'll do you good.