Script for

Episode 128:

Color in Spinning: Understanding Optical Mixing

This month is all about color. We focus on a new pillar of skillful spinning every month here on the podcast. And so with the advent of November, we turn our attention to the color pillar. Since there are five Fridays in November, I thought I would be a little self-indulgent maybe, although I'm going to work some tips and tricks into the end, but just spend a little bit of time talking about my own color journey. So that's my topic for today.

Hello there, darling Sheepspotter. Welcome to episode 129. Is it 129 or is it 128? No, it's 128. Welcome to episode 128 of the Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love. And in today's episode, I'm going to tell you how I went from being massively color challenged to becoming a dyer. It was a pretty unlikely trajectory. So when I started making things in the early 2000s, I was really, really terrified of color.

And specifically, I was terrified of combining colors and doing it wrong. I had this, this now seems hilarious to me, but it's very emblematic of where I was at the time. I was kind of obsessed with the idea that I might like accidentally make something that was ugly and I somehow wouldn't know that it was ugly, which is a really weird thing to be scared about. But there you have it. And so I've been trying this week to think about when this fear left me, and I think it happened in stages.

So I took a class probably like 2004 or 2005 with two amazing polymer clay artists, Lindley Hunani and Maggie Maggio. And I was working a lot with polymer clay at the time. And I had this, what I thought was a color problem. What I was telling myself was a color problem. them. And so I went to a big, huge polymer clay convention in Baltimore, and I took this class with them on color. And they sort of told us all to start by figuring out what our favorite color is. And that was a color question I felt competent to answer. So that was useful. They also had students do an exercise where we picked magazine images whose color we liked and sort them into piles, like put all the all the similar ones together. And then we made these big 11 by 17 collages. And again, this seemed like a very concrete task and I which I was able to accomplish. And I did learn quite a bit from doing that exercise.

Because I think I started to see color combinations that I really liked that are, you know, frequently seen in the world. Like they were represented in all of these different kinds of magazines. And so that sort of started me thinking a little bit more productively about color. And I also learned about value, hue, and saturation from Maggie Maggio. Hue is like the color's address on the color wheel. Value is how light or dark it is. That is how much white or black it contains. And saturation is how much of the pure hue is in the color. So let's take pastel pink as an example. The hue would be red. It would be light in value. So it would be towards the white end of the value scale, which is a gray scale. So it'd be towards the white end. And the white would also make it less saturated. in.

I think the two things really helped me turn the corner and get comfortable with color. The first was really coming to understand the marvelous thing that is the color wheel and learning about color harmonies. Color harmony is a way of combining hues based on where they are on the color wheel. And, you know.

These combinations are kind of widely understood to be aesthetically pleasing. And once I understood the harmonies, I could use them as a basis for color combinations with the reasonable expectation that I would get a good result. And that was very, very empowering to me.

Color harmonies very much appealed to the kind of logical part of my brain. And they gave me a sense of guardrails, I guess. The second thing that allowed me to let go of my immobilizing terror around color was going to a week-long dye camp run by Indie Dyer and Indigo Dragonfly mastermind Kim McBrien Evans. If you don't know Indigo Dragonfly's yarns, you should go check them out because she has amazing colorways and she's just an amazing colorist. She also creates really, really interesting sweater patterns. Kim McBride Evans. Anyway, it was the summer of 2013 and I was in the middle of the worst depressive, I'm laughing now, but boy, I was not laughing then, the worst depressive episode of my life. And I was pretty much barely functional, but I somehow managed to get myself organized and go to this dye camp. And it was Kim really who taught me that one could proceed logically and rationally in choosing colors and.

As one does when using a color harmony, but one could also just throw, and this was something that she did several times during the camp, she would just take all the little leftover bits of dye that we had all created in our experiments during the day, and she'd just throw them into a dye pot and onto some yarn. And every time she did it, she came up with something just that was absolutely stunning. And I said to her, okay, like, what's the trick? What are you thinking about when you do this? And she said, there is no trick. It works every time.

And it turns out to be true that it kind of does work every time. It's one of my favorite little playtime studio activities. And so learning from Kim and watching her die helped really loosen me up a lot in my approach to color. And I was still depressed when I left her. It's called the Stained Fingers Die Camp, which she still runs. So if you're in Ontario, go to Kim's Stained fingers die camp because it's really fun. And that experience really planted the seed that grew into sheep's pot.

So the first thing that I did when I got my, after I got my business license, this was in March 2014, was something that I called skein-a-day April. Because I felt like I needed to do two things which are kind of opposite to each other. I needed to experiment a lot with different dye techniques. And I also needed to start developing some colorways that would be repeatable. And skein-a-day April was a really great way to do kind of both of those things. So one of the things that I started to experiment with during skein-a-day April was, because at that point I was only dyeing yarn, Guys, you might not have been around for that part of the history, but I was only dyeing yarn at the time. So, skein a day.

I have completely lost my place. All right, hold on, hold on, hold on. Yeah, okay. So one of the things that I did, sorry, guys, during skein-a-day April was I started experimenting with pulling color combinations out of photographs. And this ultimately became, with many iterations, like I tweaked the way I did it often until I got to something that worked really well for me and fairly consistently.

Was that I would just go into Pinterest. I would usually type color into the search bar. And then I would just, sometimes I would put in photography or color aesthetic or sometimes color palette. And I would just pin anything that I found appealing, anything that I liked the look of. And basically, when I was doing that in Pinterest, I was basically doing a digital version of what Lindley and Maggie had taught me to do by clipping pictures out of magazines. It involved fewer magazines and a lot less glue. So that was good. And so once I had a photograph that I was interested in, I would use a color picking app. And there are like a zillion apps out there that will let you pull particular pixels out of a photo and put them into a palette. I recently discovered an app called, I think it's only on Mac, but it's called Color Slurp. And I really, really love it. So it will let you put as many colors as you want into your palette, which is really great. It will name, it will give each of the colors you come up with a name, which would have been really useful when I was designing a lot of colorways, because naming colors is not nearly as fun as you would think it is.

So I would use the color picking app, and I use different ones at different times. There's a Sherwin-Williams one, there's an Adobe one, there's a Benjamin Moore one. And I would select six or so colors from a photo that I thought were going to work together. And... Once I had the photo and the palette, I would move into the next phase, which was figuring out how to actually mix those colors and then doing a test on some fiber and usually tweaking the dye formulas after doing the test. And mining my pinned photos for color taught me a lot about what I like and what I don't like. I really do not like complementary color schemes, but I love split complements like blue-green, red, and orange, or red, blue-green, yellow-green. I usually try and when I'm putting together a color scheme I usually try to include hues that are weighted to one side of the color wheel but with an accent from the other side of the color wheel and I love bright colors and they definitely were visible in the sheep spots dying output but.

But almost all of my colorways also include one or two really desaturated colors or neutrals. And I usually try to keep most of the colors in the same range in terms of value. If you hate barber poling, that's one way to avoid barber poling, is to make sure that all the colors in the colorway are about the same value. But usually I like to include one that's much darker or much lighter because I just think it makes the final fabric a little more interesting if there's some, it just gives more movement to the eye if there are some light spots or dark spots.

So if I were going to sum this all up into some tips on combining colors, because I promised you tips, the first thing I would say is definitely design digitally or on paper before you jump straight to dyes and fiber because it's just a lot easier and you will save yourself a lot of dye and a lot of fiber. And there's few things more irritating in a dye studio than that experiment that went wrong that you really didn't like and you don't want to use it on anything else. And now you have the physical bottle of it. So don't do that. work on work with pixels or on paper. My next suggestion would be to really spend some time with the color harmonies and if you just Google color harmony you will get a million articles that will explain to you what they are and how they work. And I think that they make a really great starting point. And find out if there's one that you are really drawn to. Like if there is a single color harmony that you just love. Maybe you love complementary color schemes. And, you know, the red and green for Christmas really does it for you.

Then try that. Try just a bunch of different complementary combinations. And it's a great way to generate a lot of ideas quickly, is by just going to, like, what's my go-to color harmony, and then coming up with a bunch of different versions of it.

I also think it's a good idea to spend some time balancing your work with the color harmonies by spending some time just playing with color in a more freeform way. And I try to do this several times a year that I will just go into the studio and I will prep some fiber and I will put it in a dye bath and I'll just pour things on it, almost at random, not quite at random, and just sort of see what happens. And I always really loved the results and it's very different from the way I usually work. So it's just a fun thing and it does teach me something every time. So, yeah. When you're combining colors that are mostly on the same side of the color wheel, just bring something in from the other side of the color wheel because it'll make everything more interesting. It'll make your predominant color wheel side look a little more vibrant by bringing in the complement. And it just kind of makes things more interesting.

Include a desaturated color or a neutral. I really, really love yarns that have a range of saturations in them. I just think they're beautiful. And think about varying your value for a more lively fabric. So those are my tips. Also, study the work of dyers that you really like. And when I say study, I mean really take their colorways apart and figure out what all the hues are and look at the saturation and how much of a range of value is there and see if you can find any patterns because if you can find patterns in what you like, you can then go forth and make more things that you like. Don't steal other people's colorways, but use them as an exercise in thinking about color. That's what I would say. All right, so I really want to know what your relationship with color is. I would love to hear it. And as always, there is 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 to this episode, which you will find right inside your podcast app. So just open up the description for this episode, click the link, and you'll be taken right to the thread. And I really do want to hear your color stories. If you haven't joined the Flock, which is Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive hand spinners, you really should. You will get access to all of the freebies that I've created for this podcast. You'll be instantly taken to the right thread when you want to make a comment or discuss the podcast with others and you'll also get our weekly spinning check-ins several self-guided spinning challenges so just go join the flock because it's good you won't regret it and uh so darling Sheepspotter that is it for me this week thank you so much for listening I will be back next week with an episode about a concept that is absolutely fundamental to working with color, specifically as a spinner.

And I'm just going to leave it there. I'm going to leave you hanging in suspense. You do not want to miss it. Until then, though, spin something, because I have a sneaking suspicion it'll do you good.