picture

picture

Thursday 16 October 2008

the basis for the blends

when I wrote the last entry I forgot to put up a photo of my original colours - so here it comes:

originally the plan was to use either the bright or the muted set of basics, red, yellow and blue. because the colours of the fritillary are not very bright, I started with the purple by blending the muted blue and red at a ratio of 1:1. the first rolag already matched pretty well, so I assumed that blending the blue and the golden yellow would produce a suitable green, too! which it didn't. it was still blue, with yellow flecks in it. I changed to 1/3 blue and 2/3 yellow, but it still didn't even come close. I figured that I only needed white to lighten and black to darken, but not to work out the original green. so I "cheated" and used first the brighter yellow with the darker blue and then bright yellow and bright blue - and this time it worked! the theory behind only using one set of base colours is that the resulting blends will all match - but that's no good if you want to end up with a certain green to match a photo! so I figure cheating is allowed (no fibre police around?)....
mixing with white will of course lighten the colour - but adding black might have some interesting results! when I mixed red and black - it turned out to be very dark red, as would be expected. same for blue - but not for yellow! some of the yellow flowers (can't show it, copyright!) had a greenish tinge on the outer petals and I achieved this olive green shade by mixing black into the darker yellow! I thought I re-discovered the (colour) wheel! but not so - Deb Menz of course went there before me with her book "colour in spinning":)) I found her books about colour very interesting, a must-have really for any spinner! and other textile people, esp. the "ColorWorks". back to more blending - this time a real challenge, as most of the colours in the 2nd phot I'd chosen are - green! 40 shades of it or thereabouts:)
by the way - all the fibres come from a mixed bag, 1 kg contains about 30 small amounts of merino fibres in different colours - available from www.wollknoll.de in germany. good value for money, when you want to try out certain colours. all of them are available in larger amounts, so you can try out your blends and order more according to your needed ratios...

4 comments:

Helen said...

It is very interesting to see what you started from and I think I would like to do this. If I do it will be on the drum carder - I have never got really good with the hand carders. Colour is so fascinating, and it never quite does what one expects! I

Woolly Bits said...

I think hand carding needs practice just like spinning. at first I didn't have good results, the yarns were lumpy and I think, I carded far too heavy-handed; it was hard work! after a while I realised that you don't have to press the teeth together to card properly. after that it wasn't as tough anymore and my results were better too! but of course, if you want larger amounts it would take a long time to card those without a drum carder... I am sure you could get very nice colour combinations with your naturally dyed fibres!

Leigh said...

How fun. Thank you for this photo.

I agree with you about Deb Menz's book. Very informative!

Anonymous said...

hallo bettina,das mit dem Mischen von Fasern ,ihr nennt es wohl "blend", sehr beeindruckend, da bekommt man ja schöne warme und gut zueinander passende Farben wie bei der Naturfärberei, danke fürs Zeigen!
gruß wiebke