Script for

Episode 130:

The Continuum of Blendiness: Color Management Basics

Last week I talked about a crucial concept for understanding why, in yarns spun from multicolored braids, colors can appeal 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." The continuum of blendiness is a handy rubric for choosing the right color management technique to get the results you want in you yarn and fabric when spinning multicolored braids.

I've 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 want to be intentional about controlling optical mixing in your yarn and the cloth you make from it. All of the podcast freebies live inside The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive hand spinners. To join The Flock, just head to theflock.sheepspot.com. Once inside, look for the "podcast freebies" section in the main navigation menu, click through, and look for the one for episode 130.

I think most spinners have probably had the experience of spinning a vibrantly-colored braid of hand-dyed fiber into a yarn that's decidedly not vibrantly colored. It's kind of a spinning rite of passage. As we discussed last week, this phenomenon is a result of optical mixing in plied yarns, because when we spin and ply multicolored fiber are in effect placing little dots of color next to one another. When those little dots of colors 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 result. To review:

  1. To ply is to mix

  2. Diameter matters: finer singles mean more optical mixing; fatter singles mean less.

  3. Yarn structure matters: the more plies, the more optical mixing

  4. Distance matters. To really get a sense of how a yarn or fabric is going to look, you need to look at it from a distance, because optical mixing increases with distance.

What is the Continuum of Blendiness?

Picture the Continuum of Blendiness as a chart with three columns. On the left, there's a list of all the modes of color management that will minimize optical mixing, 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.

How to minimize optical mixing

If you want to virtually eliminate optical blending in your yarn, there are three ways to do it. To ply is to mix, so if you don't ply, you don't mix: 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 just break off the longer pieces and rejoin; it's a great way to practice your plying joins.

Finally, if you want to make a three-ply(-esque) yarn, you can chain ply. If you keep your chain-plying loops small you'll be able to keep the colors separate.

Spinning and plying thick singles will mitigate optical mixing somewhat, but not completely, as the three techniques I just mentioned will.

How to maximize optical mixing

If you want to create more blendiness and maximize optical mixing, you can spin thinner singles, or use three or more plies, combination drafting (see episode 101) or fractal plying.

I don't think I've ever explained fractal plying on the podcast, so I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a really good explanation Debbie Held wrote for the School of Sweet Georgia blog. Fractal plying is my go-to technique when I'm spinning a single multi-colored braid, because it results in a somewhat less stripey fabric than just spinning them from the end.

Of course you can combine these: the most extreme version would be spinning a thick three-ply where each ply was combination drafted.

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 consistent background to all of the other colors. This is something I am experimenting with a lot right now in my own work.

The "in-between" techniques

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 (where the colors are all hue next to each other on the color wheel) or with one that's very heavily weighted to one side of the wheel with little pops from the other side, you'll probably do just fine preserving the saturation of the original braid using the in-between techniques: two-ply yarns, and pre-drafting.

Today I've given you a variety of ways to maximize and minimize the optical mixing in your handspun yarns. Don't forget to download the "Continuum of Blendiness" handout for future reference as you continue to explore color in your handspun yarns and the cloth you make from them. And I'd love to see your color management experiments! You can share them 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'll find right inside your podcast app. Just open up the description for this episode, click the link, and you'll be taken right to the the thread.

Darling Sheepspotter, that's it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next week with an exercise that will really help you understand hue in a hands-on way. You definitely don't want to miss it. And you definitely want to spin something while you're waiting! Rest assured, it will do you good.