Last week, I talked about a crucial concept for understanding why, in yarns spun from multicolored braids, colors can appear very saturated in the braid and much less saturated in the final yarn. But how can we as spinners take more control over optical mixing? This episode is all about how to do just that. Hello there, darling Sheepspotter. Welcome to episode 130 of the Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love.
In today's episode, I'm going to introduce you to what I call the continuum of blendiness. And yes, that's the technical term, the continuum of blendiness. And this is just a handy rubric for choosing the right color management technique to get the results that you want in your yarn and fabric when you're spinning multicolored braids.
I have created a free PDF to accompany today's episode, which you can download and keep as a reference for whenever you're spinning a multicolored braid and you want to be intentional about controlling optical mixing in your yarn and the cloth that you make from it. All of the podcast freebies live inside The Flock, which is Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive hand spinners. And to join The Flock, just head to theflock.sheepspot.com.
And once you're inside, look for the podcast freebies section in the main navigation menu. Click through and look for the freebie for episode 130. I think probably most spinners have had the experience of spinning a vibrantly colored braid of hand-dyed fiber into a yarn that is decidedly not vibrantly colored. It's kind of a spinning rite of passage, like alongside your first three-ply sock yarn. As we discussed last week, this phenomenon is a result of optical mixing in plied yarns.
Because when we spin and ply multicolored fiber, we are in effect placing little dots of color next to one another. And when those little dots contain complementary colors or any combination of colors containing all three primaries, our brain will read those dots as if they were physically mixed, and they will look the way mixtures of all three primaries look, desaturated or even, depending on the proportions of the primaries, muddy.
When you are designing a yarn with lots of colors in it, you can use the four adages about optical mixing that I introduced last week to make decisions that will increase the likelihood that you'll be happy with the final results. And just to review those adages, the first one is to ply is to mix. When you're working with multicolored fibers and you're plying those yarns, you are mixing color. The second is that diameter matters.
Finer singles mean more optical mixing, and fatter singles mean less. Number three, yarn structure also matters. The more plies, the more optical mixing. And finally, distance matters. To really get a sense of how a yarn or a fabric is going to look, you need to look at it from a distance because optical mixing increases with distance.
And in the real world, very few people will ever be looking at your yarn or your cloth from as close a distance as you are when you are creating that yarn and that cloth. So what is the continuum of blendiness? Picture the continuum of blendiness as a chart with three columns. So on the left, there's a list of all the modes of color management that are going to minimize optical mixing. And on the right, there's a list of techniques to maximize optical mixing.
And in the middle, there's a list of sort of middle-of-the-road techniques that will give you some optical mixing. So let's talk first about how to minimize optical mixing. And if you want to virtually eliminate optical blending in your yarn, there are actually three ways to do that when you're working with multicolored fiber. To ply is to mix. So if you don't ply, you don't mix. And so the first option is that you can spin a singles yarn.
If you want a two-ply yarn, you can split your fiber in half lengthwise, spin half as one ply and half as the other, and then ply them. You will inevitably find that the color changes don't fall in exactly the same spot on each ply.
So as you're plying just break off the longer pieces and rejoin this is a great way to practice your plying joins and you will end up with a two-ply yarn in which you've got solid colors all the way through and they're going to be in the same order that the dyer placed them on the fiber. And finally, if you want to make a three-ply-esque yarn, you can chain ply. And I say it's three-ply-esque because it's really only one ply that's just folded back on itself.
It's not exactly really a three-ply yarn, but it behaves like one. So in order to get that kind of color effect and to manage color in that way, you can use chain plying or it's sometimes called Navajo plying. And if you keep your chain plying loops small, you're going to be able to keep your colors separate. It'll probably take a little bit of practice to do this, but I'm confident that
you will have it in no time. You just need to kind of pay attention to what the colors are doing as you are doing your chain ply. So all three of those techniques will pretty much eliminate optical blending in your yarn. There's another technique that you can use that will mitigate optical mixing. It won't eliminate it completely, but it will mitigate it. And that is just spinning and plying thick singles.
Right, because remember that optical mixing increases as the size of the dots of color that are next to each other decreases. So if you've got very thick singles and you're plying those, they will read more as separate colors than if you were working with finer singles. So those are techniques to minimize optical mixing in your yarns. But there are situations when you might want to maximize optical mixing in your yarns.
This is something that I am playing around with a lot, and I will say a bit more about that in a second. But if you want to create more blendiness, right, you want your colors to mix as much as possible, there are several ways you can do that. You can spin thinner singles, right, because you're going to, that's going to give you smaller dots of color. Or you can use more plies. So remember, the more plies, the more mixing.
You can use a technique called combination drafting, and I talked about that in episode 101, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Or you can use what's called fractal plying. And I looked, I did a little search, a little keyword search of the podcast, and I don't think I've ever really talked about fractal plying on the podcast. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a really good explanation of it by Debbie Held that she wrote for the School of Sweet Georgia blog.
And it's a really useful and clear explanation of how fractal plying works. And it's well illustrated. So head over to the School of Sweet Georgia blog and read Debbie's article about fractal plying if you're not familiar with it. I pretty much always fractal ply when I'm spinning a multicolored braid because it results in a somewhat less stripey fabric than just spinning them from the end would.
And that's usually what I'm going for. I don't really love those very clearly delineated horizontal stripes across my knit fabric, so fractal plying is a way to just blend the colors a little bit more. And of course, you can combine these, right? The most extreme version that I can think of off the top of my head would be spinning a very thick three-ply where each ply was combination drafted.
So you might have in each ply, let's say you're working with two colorways that are combination drafted together. In each ply, you might have as many as two colors. And then when you achieve your three ply, you're going to have as many as six colors, six little dots of color all in proximity to each other. And so obviously that's going to give you a lot of optical mixing. um. And I just said spinning a thick three-ply where each ply was combination drafted, and that is not correct.
It would be spinning a very fine three-ply where each ply was combination drafted, because you want those tiny little dots of color.
And finally if there's a color in the colorway that you really want to emphasize you could find some solid or semi-solid fiber in that color and use it as one of your plies or as a component in a combination draft that way that color would be present throughout the yarn and would act as a kind of background to all the other colors and this is something that I'm experimenting with a lot right now in my own work.
Right now, I'm doing a combination drafting project that uses four different colorways. And so, I'm taking a strip from two of the colorways, and I am drafting that together with a semi-solid. I will put a link to... No, I won't put a link to this. I will put a picture of the swatch that I came up with. It also happens to feature my cat Miles doing an adorable photobombing thing.
So check out the picture in the show notes if you want to look like, if you want to see what it looks like when you're combination drafting, but there's a solid or semi-solid color throughout. Okay, so that brings us to the in-between techniques. And there are cases where you may not need to do a lot of color management to get a great result.
If you're working with an analogous colorway, and an analogous colorway is where all the colors are next to one another on the color wheel, or if you're working with a colorway that's very heavily weighted on one side of the color wheel, but with just small amounts of color from the other side of the color wheel, you're probably going to do just fine preserving the saturation of the original braid using the techniques that I think of as kind of the in-between color management techniques.
So spinning a two-ply yarn and pre-drafting. And remember that pre-drafting is going to, and I'm just thinking that I should point you to the pre-drafting episode. I'll put it in the show notes. Pre-drafting is going to just make the transition between the colors in the colorway more gradual. And in lots of situations, that might be all that you need to do.
But the idea is to give you as many options as possible for managing color when you're spinning those beautiful hand-dyed multicolored braids. So today I have given you a variety of ways to maximize and minimize the optical mixing in your hand spun yarns. So don't forget to download the Continuum of Blendiness, the handout for your future reference as you continue to explore color in your hand spun yarns and the cloth that you make from them.
I would love to see your color management experiments. You know how I love to see your color management experiments. I just love it. You can share these in a dedicated discussion thread in the flock where you can comment on this episode and discuss it with me and other listeners. The link is in the show notes, which you will find right inside your podcast app. Just open up the description for this episode. Say hi to Miles because he'll
be in there too, along with my swatch. click the link and you will be taken right to the thread. So darling sheepspotter, that is it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening. I will be back next week with an exercise that will really help you understand hue in a hands-on way. So if you think of yourself as a person who has difficulty kind of seeing the difference between, say, a blue and a blue violet, this exercise will really help.
I did this at my retreat this year, and everybody really loved it, and I think they learned a lot. So you definitely don't want to miss that, and you definitely want to spin something while you're waiting, right? Because it's going to do you good. We know that by now, right?