Script for

Episode 129:

Color in Spinning: Understanding Optical Mixing

If you want to control how color shows up in your handspun yarns, there's one thing 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, will kind of mush them together and 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. The smaller the dots and the farther away you are for them, the stronger the optical mixing will be. You'll "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.

Have you ever blended two solid color fibers (naturally colored or dyed)? Up close it 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 mixture of the two colors? Optical mixing is why that happens.

Optically-mixed colors can appear more vibrant than "admixed" or physically-mixed colors. Admixing is the physical mixing of pigments, and it generally dulls the colors some. But in optical mixes, the original colors retain their intensity and brightness.

Optical mixing is how painting techniques like pointillism create the impression of rich, complex colors in works like Seurat's A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And understanding of optical mixing is crucial to understanding how color works in spinning.

To Ply is To Mix

When we spin colored fiber, we are in effect creating long, slender lines of color. The finer the yarn, the thinner the lines of colors. When we take that slender line of color and ply it with another different line of color, we've created the perfect conditions for optical mixing: adjacent little dots of color. This brings me to my first adage about optical mixing: when you ply multicolored fiber, you are, in effect, mixing the colors. So repeat after me: To ply is to mix.

The First Adage means that the same rules apply when plying as would apply if you were mixing a physical 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 ply a bright color with its complement (the opposite color on the color wheel) the result will read from a distance as a muddy neutral because of optical mixing. Indeed any time you ply together two singles that together encompass all three primaries (cyan, magenta, and yellow), the result will read from a distance as a muddy neutral. Finally, any time you're plying a color and a neutral, that will also have the effect of desaturating the colors in your yarn. So these are things to be aware of when you are selecting multicolored braids and planning how to spin them.

Diameter Matters: The Second Adage

Remember that the smaller the dots of color you can see, the more your brain will smush those colors together, or, in other words, the more optical mixing there will be. This means that yarns plied from finer singles will produce more optical mixing than yarns made from plying thicker singles. Thinner singles = more optical mixing. Thicker singles = less.

The Third Adage: Ply Structure Matters, Too

The ply structure you choose will also have a big impact on optical mixing in your yarns when you're spinning multicolored braids. In a two-ply yarn, you'll have two colors next to each other. 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 and 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. If to mix is to ply, then the more plies you have the more mixing you'll get, and the more desaturated your yarn will appear from a distance. Which brings me to my fourth adage about optical mixing in handspun yarns.

Adage #4: Distance Matters

It's easy for us to think that the colors in our handspun will look brighter than they actually will because when we're spinning and working with our yarns we're so close to them. They are 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. Others, especially, will see that cloth from farther away. Because optical mixing increases with distance, it's important to get some distance from your yarn and cloth to get a true sense of how the color will read.

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 multi-colored fiber that's going to be plied. And I've given you four adages to keep in mind about optical mixing: 1) to ply is to mix; 2) 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; 3) more plies = more blending; and 4) that you need to step away from your yarn and cloth to fully appreciate the effects of optical mixing, which increases as the distance between the object and the observer increases.

That's it for me this week, darling Sheepspotter. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this episode will help you create the color effects you want in your handspun yarns and the cloth you make from them. I'd love to know what you think, and I invite you to comment on and discuss this episode with other Sheepspotters in the Flock. There's a link to a discussion thread dedicated to this episode in your show notes, which you'll find right inside your podcast app.

There is much more to be said about this topic, so I'll 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 look when you're working with multicolored braids. You don't want to miss it. Until then, spin something! I'm positive it will do you good.