One of my first realizations about spinning was that it gives you total control to make any type of yarn you can think of. For a really long time, one of my goals has been to find a kind of variegated yarn that only has a few dashes of bright color and will never pool. I also do not like hand painted yarns as much as those with fibers spun after dying. So I set out to make my own method of a color burst yarn, and came up with a formula for spinning 2 fibers together using joins and then chain plying in a deliberate way. The result is exactly what I wanted, so I made some videos to share the process with other spinners who may want to use the same formula. Part one covers the singles and the second part explains plying, which is easy, but has a certain trick to it that really makes the yarn. I'm really into how the end product looks in this scarf, but also into this swatch of a solid fiber base with multi color dashes of color. So much versatility. I cant wait to make more and to see your projects if you decide to try it out !! Remember there's still a week left in the Tour de Fleece.

Last month, I shared the final two yarns in my Spinning into Focus series, demonstrating the two most popular methods used by spinners to avoid completely blending the colours in a multicoloured top together. My idea was that by the end of this blog series, I would have a sweater quantity of different yarns, all spun from the same multi-coloured, commercially available blended top - Slack Ma Girdle from John Arbon Textiles. The yarns all have varying levels of colour blending so that I can eventually knit a garment that has the colours appearing to come into focus as they work their way down, up, or across the garment. The yarns are unquestionably complementary as they will all have the same primary colours at their base. I rarely have the patience or attention span required to spin a sweater quantity of fibre, so dividing it up into lots of little spins has really helped to keep me motivated. Well, I didn’t know how many different techniques I was going to use when I began, but I’ve finally finished spinning my original 700g of fibre into 10 different yarns - And here they all are! From a distance, you get the impression that they’re all a warm autumnal brown colour… … but when you get just a little bit closer you start to see those pops of colour more clearly. The other reason I love this approach to spinning a multi-coloured blended top is that it satisfies the dual sides of my personal taste - When it comes to spinning yarns, I would much rather spin a glorious array of ever-changing colour that holds my attention and keeps me interested; however, when it comes to my fashion choices, I'm much more reserved. By spinning the yarns into focus, I have a range of coloured yarns that go from an understated, neutral to a colourful statement yarn, and all of the possibilities in between. It has been such a satisfying project! In the images below you can see that I’ve hand wound all of my yarns into nostepinne style balls as I think this is one of the best ways of showing the length of the different colour sections within a variegated yarn. The following is a rundown of all the techniques I used in this blog series and their accompanying videos. Click on the heading to read more about how the yarns were spun. There’s also a rundown of all 10 yarns in video form here - Technique 1: Drum Carding for a Homogeneous Blend. Technique 2: Using Mini Wool Combs Technique 3: Drafting the Top and Spinning from the End. Technique 4: Laying the fibres onto a blending board and then dizzing them off Technique 5: Spinning from the end of the top without pre-drafting Technique 6: Drafting 3 Layers onto a Blending Board and rolling off 3 Rolags Technique 7: placing a single layer onto the blending board and pulling off 3 rolags Technique 8: placing a single layer on the blending board and then rolling off a single rolag The Wildcards Called such because they don’t really fit into the pattern of the colour sections becoming progressively longer and less muddy with each yarn. The first has much longer colour sections but the colours are quite muted, and the second has the brightest colours of all the yarns, but also the shortest colour sections. Wildcard #1: Breaking the Top into a Fibonacci Sequence and then Splitting it Vertically Wildcard #2: Spinning From the Fold Sampling Well, I normally find swatch knitting very tedious but I don’t think I’ve ever been so motivated to knit up a square of handspun yarn - Here are all 10 yarns knitted into focus. I knitted 4 rows of each yarn, apart from the final spun from the fold yarn at the bottom which is also carried through to the garter stitch bottom edging. It really is the busiest and most colourful of yarns so I’m still a little undecided as to whether I will include it in my final garment… As an aside, while I was spinning all of my different yarns, I designed some yarn tags so that I could easily keep track of which technique I'd used with which yarn. I designed them to fit on the back of my printable handspun yarn labels. I can see them coming in handy for sampling small amounts of fibre before going on to spin for a larger project. I will definitely be using them a lot in the future. The yarn geek in me also couldn’t resist making these little Spinning into Focus WPI tags to record my project. It feels like it’s been such a worthwhile exercise and I wanted to have a reference to look back on after I’ve knitted up all of my yarn. I'll probably share the printables in a future blog post soon. I don't imagine many spinners will want to spin all 10 techniques but a few of my Instagram spinning friends have said that they’d like to try spinning into focus on a smaller scale so hopefully they’ll come in useful. Thank you so much for coming along with me on my Spinning into Focus journey. I’ve had so many lovely comments about this spinning series and I’ve been so very grateful to all the spinners cheering me on along the way. I’ve had a blast! If you’ve enjoyed this post or found any of this series useful, please pin it to Pinterest. It really makes a big difference to me and helps other spinners find it too. At this point, I normally suggest similar related blog posts, however, my list of spinning-related content is becoming a little unmanageable... If you'd like to read more blog posts about spinning and fibre preparation, please take a look at this page here where you will find links to all of my spinning and fibre articles. Thank you for reading, and happy spinning! Other Spinning-Related Blog Posts Spinning into Focus Techniques 1, 2 and 3 Spinning into Focus - Techniques 4 and 5 Spinning into Focus Techniques 6, 7 and 8 Spinning into Focus - The Two Most popular methods used by spinners to avoid 'Spinning mud' 9 Different Ways of Spinning a Multicoloured Blend While Trying to Avoid 'Spinning Mud' Spinning into Focus Linear Blending a Gradient Hackle Blending a Long Gradient Free Handspun Yarn Labels Spinning Dog Hair DIY Hackle DIY Mini Wool Combs Yarn Gauge Reference Tool for Hand Spinners Spinning Supercoil Yarn Using Waste Fibres Spinning a Complex Fractal 3 Ply Yarn

There are many benefits of spinning yarn with a drop spindle. We will discuss how to use a drop spindle, so if you are brand new, this article is for you!

25 Scrap Yarn Projects to use up all those bits of Leftover Yarn

Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time spinning merino and other finer fibres that I’ve prepared myself; whether it’s combed top using my mini wool combs, blended top on my hackle, or rolag-punis on my blending board. Earlier this year, however, I took a trip to Wonderwool Wales where I treated myself to a sweater quantity of fibre - I bought this hand-painted blue-faced Leicester and camel blend… … and this blend of Black Welsh wool and merino, along with some recycled sari silk. The V Back Tee - image copyright Jamie Hoffman I had the idea that I would knit a beautiful, deep red, long-sleeved V-Back Tee sweater to wear on Christmas day. It was going to be luxurious! Unfortunately, both of the wool tops that I purchased had quite a few coarse fibres, and the recycled sari silk was definitely going to add to the itch factor. 3-ply fractal yarn spun from hand-painted top 3-ply yarn spun from Welsh Black wool and Merino, blended with sari silk They were still beautiful yarns, and a few years ago I would have been over-the-moon with them, but they just didn’t have the neck soft, quality feel to them that I was hoping for. Well, I was originally going to knit the V-Back Tee sweater using just two colours, but as I definitely don’t want either of my original yarns to sit around my neck and shoulders, I decided to design my own complementary, 3ply fractal yarn using techniques that I’ve been practicing over the last couple of years. In a fractal yarn, you divide the hand-painted top down the middle, vertically, into the number of plies you want to spin, and then those sections are divided into an increasing number of sections so that the colour repeats become shorter with each ply. By varying the length of the colour sections within each ply, you take control of the amount of colour pooling when it is plied, and achieve a consistent mix of colours throughout the whole of the yarn. I’m calling this technique a complex fractal yarn as there will be changes to the colour arrangement within each ply, and it will be much more designed than a fractal yarn, but it will be based on the same basic principle. I’m hoping that the final yarn will have the look of a fractal yarn, but with a much more heathered, complex appearance when you take a closer look. Jonquil (yellow), Mediterranean (cyan), raspberry (magenta), scarlet (red) and lightning (white) from World of Wool. Blue and black from John Arbon Textiles Instead of using hand-painted top, I’ll be blending merino wool in red, blue, yellow, cyan and magenta, along with black and white. Hopefully, I’ll use my experience with colour blending to design a variegated yarn that is mostly red and burgundy, with the occasional pop of contrasting colour. I’ll list the recipes for each colour below, but here’s a video showing my combing technique for mixing a beautiful blue/violet colour. If you'd like to see my process for preparing this yarn in more detail, I've made a 7-minute video here which shows some of the techniques in more detail than I can here. Ply 1 These are the blended colours I began with for my first ply, and the amount of fibre I can comfortably get onto my hand made hackle. All of these little nests have been hand blended with my 3D printed mini wool combs using the merino wool primaries above. Each of my plies will have the same three blended red colours carried throughout them (rows 1, 3 and 4 above) but the colours in the second row will be swapped out for two different colours with each ply. (Please ignore the spacing of my colours here - it was my first attempt at loading my hackle and my maths went a little awry!) As the main three colours that are carried throughout all three plies make up three-quarters of the colour content, I divided the number of spikes on my hackle by four and placed the three main colours on this number of spikes. There are 79 spikes on one row of my hackle so I placed the dusky pink on the central 20 spikes and the 2 darker reds on the outer 20 spikes. The olive green and light pink were placed on the remaining, off-centre, 10 and 9 spikes. (I'll go into my hackle loading technique lower down) Here’s an animated gif of my technique for pulling off the first ply. I go left and right, using a small hole in my diz to control the amount of fibre drafted off each time. If this was a traditional fractal yarn, this would be the ply that had been divided up the most. I’m pulling off a fibre length of merino, and every time I return my diz to the hackle I move along to the next section of fibre. This ensures that the colour sections are as short as possible. As I work my way towards the hackle, the colour sections will inevitably become shorter as the fibres become shorter - but this will be the case for all of my plies, so hopefully, it should only add to the complexity of the yarn. You can see all of the colours in this first ply around the outside of my nest of pulled top. Ply 2 These are the colours I blended for my 2nd ply. The colour recipes can be found below. After pulling off the top for the first ply, I decided that I didn't want any green in the other two plies. The green, combined with the reds would result in what would appear to be a lot of brown running through the yarn. I quite like the idea of a little muddiness to tone the yarn down, but I wanted the reds and burgundies to be the dominant colours. I made a video of my hackle loading and dizzing technique in more depth here - I find inserting a strip of craft plastic to the left of where I want my fibre to end helps me to take better control of where I place the fibre on the hackle. Sliding my fibre down the side of the plastic strip ensures that all of the spikes are filled, without the fibre traveling further along than I want it to. This was my drafting technique for the second ply. In a traditional fractal yarn, you might double the number of times the strips of hand-painted top are divided up with each ply. As I'm drafting the fibre off my hackle, I alter the lengths of the colour sections by doubling the amount of fibre I pull off with each pass. If you look carefully, I draft fibre twice from the same spot before moving along to the next section of fibre. This should hopefully give me colour sections that are approximately twice as long as in the first ply. Ply 2 Pulled off the hackle Here's my pulled top for ply 2, wound into a ball. You have to really look into the ball to see the blue fibre that was pulled off much later on in the first pass along the hackle. Ply 3 These are the colours I blended for my 3rd ply, the colour recipes can be found below. After blending for my first two plies, I decided that I really wanted all of the colours in this ply to be from the red family, so that there would be a red/pink ply running throughout the entire yarn. You may have noticed that I changed the arrangement of my main 3 reds with every ply. As I drafted from right to left, and then back again, it meant that the outer two colour sections drafted out twice as long as the centre colour (and appeared half as frequently). For this reason, each of the main reds took turns to be placed in the centre section - another factor that added to the complexity of my final yarn. In this animated gif you can see that I draft the fibres from the same spot four times before moving onto the next section. If this was a traditional fractal yarn, this would be the ply spun from the least divided hand-painted top section, and the ply with the longest colour areas. Here's the fibre for the third ply after it's been drafted off my hackle. Hopefully, you can see that the colour sections are much longer than in the previous two plies. Three full Nano bobbins, ready to ply! It's really quite exciting, not knowing how my yarn is going to turn out! Even after I'd plied it on my Hansencrafts Minispinner, I didn't truly get a feel for how well the colours were going to work together until I'd wound it into a skein... Ta-da! What do you think?! I absolutely love it! I love how, from across the room, it looks like a heathered, deep red colour with pink stripes running through it, but when you get a little closer, there are so many more colour combinations in there. I’m actually quite pleased that my original two yarns were slightly disappointing. I’m not sure I would have had the patience to do all of that blending to design my ideal complementary yarn otherwise. So often I write tutorials, partly to share my techniques, but mostly so that I can look back at my notes in the future and remind myself how I did something at a later date. I do wonder if this is yet another of my tutorials where I’m the only person that is actually bonkers enough to give it a go? This is quite an extreme example of my complex fractal concept. Of course, not all of the colours need to be blended by hand and you don’t necessarily have to change the colour arrangement with every ply. It could just be a way of using up your stash of dyed wool to create a unique fractal yarn for a fraction of the price of buying hand painted top. Please do let me know if you try out my complex fractal technique. It would really make my day! If you've found this post interesting or useful, please pin it to Pinterest. It makes a big difference to me and helps other spinners find it too. If you'd like to be updated when I post a video version of this blog post please follow my YouTube channel. At this point, I normally suggest similar related blog posts, however, my list of spinning-related content is becoming a little unmanageable... If you'd like to read more blog posts about spinning and fibre preparation, please take a look at this page here where you will find links to all of my spinning and fibre articles. Thank you for reading, and happy spinning! --- You may be interested in some of my other spinning-related blog posts - 9 Different Ways of Spinning a Multicoloured Blend While Trying to Avoid 'Spinning Mud' Spinning into Focus Chain-Plying at the Wheel Versus Making a Chain-Plied Ball Blending and Spinning a Rainbow Yarn 2 Ways Linear Blending a Gradient Hackle Blending a Long Gradient Using a Blending Board to blend a Repeatable Sweater Quantity How to Measure Handspun Yarn Using an App Free Handspun Yarn Labels Spinning Dog Hair DIY Hackle DIY Mini Wool Combs 3D Printed Modular Lazy Kate Yarn Gauge Reference Tool for Hand Spinners Testing the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter Prototype Spinning Supercoil Yarn Using Waste Fibres Unbiased Review of the Daedalus Sparrow Testing the LWS Autowinder for the Electric Eel Wheel 6 ---------- Please be sweet and share the love. Leave a comment, subscribe to my YouTube channel, like my Facebook page for regular updates or follow me on Pinterest, Bloglovin' or Instagram

The craft of yarn spinning allows you to turn loose fibers into beautiful yarns with unique pattern, colour and texture combinations. This page offers an introduction and inspiration for beginners.

A brand new roving just arrived in your mailbox … what do you do first? I’m pretty sure we all give it a good pet and squish and revel in its beauty just as it comes. I mean after you’ve done that. There is no wrong answer. An answer I’ve heard repeatedly …

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By Benjamin KrudwigFor our fiber collaboration this month, I had the pleasure of working with Into the Whirled. This month, I wanted to try my hand at spinning beaded yarn. There are a few ways to spin beads into yarn, but I think I might have chosen the most involved (but most secure) method.The inspiration for my skein came from the name of the colorway; "Cripple Creek." As many Coloradans know, Cripple Creek was a hotspot during the gold rush of 1890 founded by Bobby Womack. When I was a child, my grandfather and my uncle wrote a musical called "Bobby Womack and the City of Gold" so the link between Cripple Creek and gold has stuck with me ever since. I chose gold beads for this reason.

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“I don’t want to spin mud” - This is a very common phrase uttered amongst hand spinners and it refers to the frustrating phenomenon of buying the most beautiful, multi-coloured blend of fibres, and then spinning a yarn from it that, from a short distance, looks like a murky brown or dirty grey colour. I’ve done it myself. I bought three hundred grams of World of Wool’s Fairytale blend called “Over the Rainbow” and took it away on holiday to spin. Image copyright World of Wool It’s gorgeous, and if I’d spun it using a drafting or preparation method that would have kept those colours separated, I would have achieved a beautifully variegated yarn… Unfortunately, I blindly drafted it all and then spun it from the end using a short forward draw. My resulting yarn came out a slightly disappointing dirty green colour. I achieved this muddy result due to optical blending - when two or more small areas of colour are repeated, very close together, the eye doesn’t perceive them as separate colours, but instead blends them together. Plotting the colours from Over the Rainbow on a colour wheel If I’d actually stopped to think about it, basic colour theory would have told me that any blend that contains colours from all the way around the colour wheel will inevitably turn out to be just a little bit brown or grey, if it’s not spun with the intention of maintaining larger areas of each colour, so that the eye still sees each shade in its original hue, when it’s spun and plied into the final yarn. Helpfully, World of Wool lists the individual colours in the Over the Rainbow blend. When you see them separated out like this, it’s not surprising that my finely drafted singles ended up a dirty green colour. Without the red, I probably would have got a fresh green, but throw in its opposite colour and things begin to turn brown. Since my first and only experience of “spinning mud,” I’ve been very cautious to only buy blends made from analogous shades - colours that sit relatively close together on the colour wheel, so that if they were all mixed together you wouldn’t get grey or brown, but a heathered, richer shade of the sum of all the colours. I’ve been playing it safe. Well, my fibre preparation skills have improved quite a bit over the last few years, and so I’ve decided to play around a little and experiment with a few different methods of spinning a multi-coloured blended top. Since the unfortunate incident with the Over the Rainbow fibre blend, I’ve learned that the two most popular methods deployed to avoid spinning mud are to either spin from the fold, or to tear off strips so that you are spinning from a reduced number of colours. I’ve got a couple of other methods that I’d like to try, but basically, I’m just going to have fun playing around with coloured fibres to see what I come up with. I’ve had the idea for this post for some time now, and when I was taking a look at the secret “Mill Members” page of John Arbon Textiles I found the perfect fibre blend for this project. This is “Midsommar” by John Arbon. It seems to be made up of turquoise, black, orange, red, and a tiny dash of yellow and white. Just the fact that it contains quite a bit of both turquoise and orange tells me that there’s a good chance that my yarn will end up brown if I’m not careful. A quick way to get an idea of what kind of optical blend I would get is to blend the colours digitally beforehand… The central rectangle selection of the fibre image has been blurred in Procreate … and yes, it looks like there is a very good chance of ending up with a dull grey/brown. This could be challenging. Each single will later be chain-plied with relatively short chains to finish it, as this is the easiest way of increasing the chance of getting the different colours to pool with themselves. The control - lashing onto a hackle I’m going to begin by intentionally blending the fibres together by randomly throwing them onto my hackle and then dizzing off a thin roving. This will give me a yarn with quite a thorough blend of colours, and it will be useful to compare my later yarns with. If I were to draft out all of the blended top, and then spin from the end, I imagine that I would get a very similar colour effect. Here’s the hackle blended yarn. It’s quite an attractive, heathered brown shade, and I love how, when you look closely, you can see the turquoise and orange shades. However, there’s no denying that it’s a long way from the bold, contrasting blended top that I started with. Control yarn knitted sample #1 Spinning from the end, without pre-drafting With my first method, I drafted from the very tip of the blended top. Normally, I would predraft my fibres, but that would only thin out each colour, forcing me to spin from all of the colours at the same time. Working from undrafted top allowed me to spin for a while on the individual colours, before moving onto the next colour along. It took a little more concentration, but I think it was quite effective. I love the tweedy subtlety of this yarn - the orange and turquoise flecks are dotted around the mostly warm brown background. Control yarn and yarn spun from the end of undrafted top. #2 Spinning from the fold To spin from the fold, I pulled off a small section, that was just 10-15cm long. (I did try longer lengths, but the fibres tended to bunch up in my hand after a little while.) I then opened up the top and spread it across my index finger so that I could see as many of the different bands of colour as possible. I then spun from the centre of the fibres, effectively spinning the blended top from the side, so that the colours were mostly spun one after the other, rather than combined with each other. The resulting yarn appeared to be the most colourful, with the most barber poling, and the least colour mixing of all of the yarns. As I'd pulled off a shortish length of blended top, it also gave me the shortest individual lengths of colour variegation - which explains why there is so much more barber poling in this yarn than in any of the others. I can definitely see why this is a popular method for avoiding optical blending, as it was very little extra effort, once I’d worked out my preferred technique. Control yarn and yarn spun from the fold Personally, I think this spinning method would look better with a blended top that is made up of analogous shades as the colour changes were much more sudden in the knitted sample, than in any of the others. It is still a very pretty yarn though. Here's a video of me 'spinning from the fold' in a little more detail. #3 Splitting the top vertically into a reduced number of colours, and then breaking each section up to distribute it throughout the yarn The Midsommar top, was really quite well blended, which made splitting it vertically challenging. My goal was to split the blended top into sections that contained just one or two colours, but unfortunately, some of the colour sections were so thin that I was either spinning from sections that barely needed any drafting, or it just wasn’t possible to divide it into sections that wouldn’t turn brown. It was also a little more effort than the previous 2 spinning methods. It did give me quite long sections of colour though, compared to some of the other spinning methods. Control yarn and top split vertically yarn This yarn felt much more designed than the previous yarns. Although I spun the colours randomly, for speed, I could have arranged them into a gradient, or had longer or shorter colour changes if I had a specific project in mind. This method definitely has a lot of possibilities. This was one of my favourite yarns, so I made a video of how I made it. #4 Drafting onto a blending board and then spinning from 3 rolags. In this method, I drafted the fibre onto the blending board, trying to keep each coloured layer the same. I then pulled off 3 rolags from the blending board, drafting them off as I rolled. In retrospect, I think it was quite optimistic of me to hope that carefully putting down 4 layers of fibre on top of each other would ensure that all of the individual colours would stay together during spinning. As you can see, they mostly merged together, with the odd pop of colour here and there. Control yarn and 4 layers drafted onto a blending board yarn The resulting yarn was quite subtle, with the odd fleck of colour on a mostly brown background. #5 Drafting thickly onto a blending board and then spinning from 1 large rolag After realising that adding lots of thin layers resulted in a lot more blending of colours, I decided to try something slightly different. This time, I only slightly drafted the fibres onto the blending board in just a couple of layers. I then pulled all of the fibre off in one, large rolag. Whenever I've seen anyone using a blending board in the past, I've always wondered why they don't pull off just a single rolag, instead of splitting it into two or more. I'd never tried it myself, but as this was definitely a time to play and experiment, I decided to give it a try to see what difference it made. The resulting rolag looked like it had so much potential and promise, but sadly, it was probably the least fun to spin. The fibres, being wound thickly, took much more effort to draft. It was also impossible to stop the colours from blending as they all seemed to want to be drawn out of the centre of the rolag at once. If I were to class any of the yarns as a fail, this would be it. Control yarn and yarn spun from a single, fat rolag There is a hint of orange in the cast-on edge, and the odd pop of colour here and there, but it's overwhelmingly brown. It was an interesting learning experiment, but I won't be trying it again. #6 Opening up the top so that the individual colours lie next to each other in a single layer, and then drafting off four rolags Well, we learn so much more from our mistakes than our triumphs, and for my third attempt at using the blending board, I worked out a method that really worked for me. I'd already learned that the more layers I draft onto the blending board, the more likely they are to blend together during spinning, so this time I decided not to draft the fibres on at all. I simply opened up the blended top so that I could see as many of the individual colours as possible, broke it off and then carefully attached it to the blending board with my blending brush. Having already learned that one thick rolag was definitely not a good idea, I drafted off four separate, thin rolags. The thin rolags were a little more delicate, but the fibres drafted smoothly from them, the colours blending from one to another easily. This turned out to be one of my favourite yarns, not just in appearance, but by how easy it was to prepare and spin. It was a joy, and I ended up spinning more of this yarn than any of the others. Control yarn and yarn spun from a single, undrafted layer Aesthetically, it's quite similar to the yarn that was spun from the fold, but the colours are just a little bit more muted and the colour changes appear a little less sudden. #7 Opening up the top so that the individual colours lie next to each other in a single layer on the blending board, and then drafting off with a diz After my success with a single undrafted layer, I decided to see the difference dizzing the fibre off would make. The fibres were laid down on the blending board in the same way as method 6. Just in this animated gif, you can see that several colours are being pulled off at once, which is definitely going to result in a lot more optical blending. This was one of the more subtly coloured yarns that I spun. Control yarn and yarn dizzed off from a single layer There's a definite place for this understated yarn, and the pops of colour add interest to what is still quite a reserved yarn. #8 Opening up the top so that the individual colours lie next to each other in 3 layers on the blending board, and then drafting off with a diz The only difference between this and the previous yarn is that I laid the fibre on the blending board in 3 layers - attempting to colour match as I laid down the fibre. The fibre for this yarn was a little easier to diz off as it was laid more thickly on the blending board. Control yarn and yarn dizzed off from 3 layers It's still quite similar in appearance to the previous yarn, there are just slightly more areas of colour. #9 Tearing out each individual colour and arranging it in a gradient on the blending board, then drafting off 4 rolags This was by far the most time-consuming method of avoiding optical blending, but I think it's one of the most attractive. As the Midsommar blend was really quite well blended, I found myself pulling off very thin strands to arrange them on the blending board in such a way that they wouldn't all merge into brown. I did actually fill the blending board with a gradient twice - the second time took significantly less time than the first, so I imagine that this is a technique that would get quicker with practice. Having learned that thinner rolags are better for preventing colour blending, I pulled off four quite delicate, but very attractive rolags to spin from. Looking at the singles on the wheel, I love how the colours are very distinct and transition beautifully from one to the other. This resulting yarn looks like it might have been spun from a hand-painted top - but for a fraction of the price! Control yarn and yarn arranged in a gradient on a blending board Here, you can see that this yarn, unsurprisingly, has the longest of all the colour repeats. Like the yarn split vertically, this method has a lot of potential variations. This video shows me separating out the colours in a little more detail - ----- Gosh, I’ve learned so much, just allowing myself to play with fibre this past couple of weeks. I would highly recommend it! I’ve also fallen back in love with my blending board, now that I’ve learned different ways of using it to avoid spinning mud. As you can see, I've made four videos of the techniques that I think worked best, and you can find them, and other fibre-to-yarn videos on my YouTube channel here. If you've found this post useful, please pin it to Pinterest - it makes a big difference and really helps other spinners find it too. At this point, I normally suggest similar related blog posts, however, my list of spinning-related content is becoming a little unmanageable... If you'd like to read more blog posts about spinning and fibre preparation, please take a look at this page here where you will find links to all of my spinning and fibre articles. Thank you for reading, and happy spinning! Some of my Other Spinning Related Posts Spinning into Focus Linear Blending a Gradient Hackle Blending a Long Gradient Blending and Spinning a Rainbow Yarn 2 Ways Chain-Plying at the Wheel Versus Making a Chain-Plied Ball How to Measure Handspun Yarn Using an App Free Handspun Yarn Labels Spinning Dog Hair DIY Hackle DIY Mini Wool Combs 3D Printed Modular Lazy Kate Yarn Gauge Reference Tool for Hand Spinners Testing the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter Prototype Spinning Supercoil Yarn Using Waste Fibres Unbiased Review of the Daedalus Sparrow Testing the LWS Autowinder for the Electric Eel Wheel 6 Spinning a Complex Fractal 3 Ply Yarn ---------- Please be sweet and share the love. Leave a comment, subscribe to my YouTube channel, like my Facebook page for regular updates or follow me on Pinterest, Bloglovin' or Instagram

I have been a spinner where I “let the fiber tell me what to do”. This is not a bad starting place However, when you are spinning for a project, most likely you will not spin all that you need in o…

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time spinning merino and other finer fibres that I’ve prepared myself; whether it’s combed top using my mini wool combs, blended top on my hackle, or rolag-punis on my blending board. Earlier this year, however, I took a trip to Wonderwool Wales where I treated myself to a sweater quantity of fibre - I bought this hand-painted blue-faced Leicester and camel blend… … and this blend of Black Welsh wool and merino, along with some recycled sari silk. The V Back Tee - image copyright Jamie Hoffman I had the idea that I would knit a beautiful, deep red, long-sleeved V-Back Tee sweater to wear on Christmas day. It was going to be luxurious! Unfortunately, both of the wool tops that I purchased had quite a few coarse fibres, and the recycled sari silk was definitely going to add to the itch factor. 3-ply fractal yarn spun from hand-painted top 3-ply yarn spun from Welsh Black wool and Merino, blended with sari silk They were still beautiful yarns, and a few years ago I would have been over-the-moon with them, but they just didn’t have the neck soft, quality feel to them that I was hoping for. Well, I was originally going to knit the V-Back Tee sweater using just two colours, but as I definitely don’t want either of my original yarns to sit around my neck and shoulders, I decided to design my own complementary, 3ply fractal yarn using techniques that I’ve been practicing over the last couple of years. In a fractal yarn, you divide the hand-painted top down the middle, vertically, into the number of plies you want to spin, and then those sections are divided into an increasing number of sections so that the colour repeats become shorter with each ply. By varying the length of the colour sections within each ply, you take control of the amount of colour pooling when it is plied, and achieve a consistent mix of colours throughout the whole of the yarn. I’m calling this technique a complex fractal yarn as there will be changes to the colour arrangement within each ply, and it will be much more designed than a fractal yarn, but it will be based on the same basic principle. I’m hoping that the final yarn will have the look of a fractal yarn, but with a much more heathered, complex appearance when you take a closer look. Jonquil (yellow), Mediterranean (cyan), raspberry (magenta), scarlet (red) and lightning (white) from World of Wool. Blue and black from John Arbon Textiles Instead of using hand-painted top, I’ll be blending merino wool in red, blue, yellow, cyan and magenta, along with black and white. Hopefully, I’ll use my experience with colour blending to design a variegated yarn that is mostly red and burgundy, with the occasional pop of contrasting colour. I’ll list the recipes for each colour below, but here’s a video showing my combing technique for mixing a beautiful blue/violet colour. If you'd like to see my process for preparing this yarn in more detail, I've made a 7-minute video here which shows some of the techniques in more detail than I can here. Ply 1 These are the blended colours I began with for my first ply, and the amount of fibre I can comfortably get onto my hand made hackle. All of these little nests have been hand blended with my 3D printed mini wool combs using the merino wool primaries above. Each of my plies will have the same three blended red colours carried throughout them (rows 1, 3 and 4 above) but the colours in the second row will be swapped out for two different colours with each ply. (Please ignore the spacing of my colours here - it was my first attempt at loading my hackle and my maths went a little awry!) As the main three colours that are carried throughout all three plies make up three-quarters of the colour content, I divided the number of spikes on my hackle by four and placed the three main colours on this number of spikes. There are 79 spikes on one row of my hackle so I placed the dusky pink on the central 20 spikes and the 2 darker reds on the outer 20 spikes. The olive green and light pink were placed on the remaining, off-centre, 10 and 9 spikes. (I'll go into my hackle loading technique lower down) Here’s an animated gif of my technique for pulling off the first ply. I go left and right, using a small hole in my diz to control the amount of fibre drafted off each time. If this was a traditional fractal yarn, this would be the ply that had been divided up the most. I’m pulling off a fibre length of merino, and every time I return my diz to the hackle I move along to the next section of fibre. This ensures that the colour sections are as short as possible. As I work my way towards the hackle, the colour sections will inevitably become shorter as the fibres become shorter - but this will be the case for all of my plies, so hopefully, it should only add to the complexity of the yarn. You can see all of the colours in this first ply around the outside of my nest of pulled top. Ply 2 These are the colours I blended for my 2nd ply. The colour recipes can be found below. After pulling off the top for the first ply, I decided that I didn't want any green in the other two plies. The green, combined with the reds would result in what would appear to be a lot of brown running through the yarn. I quite like the idea of a little muddiness to tone the yarn down, but I wanted the reds and burgundies to be the dominant colours. I made a video of my hackle loading and dizzing technique in more depth here - I find inserting a strip of craft plastic to the left of where I want my fibre to end helps me to take better control of where I place the fibre on the hackle. Sliding my fibre down the side of the plastic strip ensures that all of the spikes are filled, without the fibre traveling further along than I want it to. This was my drafting technique for the second ply. In a traditional fractal yarn, you might double the number of times the strips of hand-painted top are divided up with each ply. As I'm drafting the fibre off my hackle, I alter the lengths of the colour sections by doubling the amount of fibre I pull off with each pass. If you look carefully, I draft fibre twice from the same spot before moving along to the next section of fibre. This should hopefully give me colour sections that are approximately twice as long as in the first ply. Ply 2 Pulled off the hackle Here's my pulled top for ply 2, wound into a ball. You have to really look into the ball to see the blue fibre that was pulled off much later on in the first pass along the hackle. Ply 3 These are the colours I blended for my 3rd ply, the colour recipes can be found below. After blending for my first two plies, I decided that I really wanted all of the colours in this ply to be from the red family, so that there would be a red/pink ply running throughout the entire yarn. You may have noticed that I changed the arrangement of my main 3 reds with every ply. As I drafted from right to left, and then back again, it meant that the outer two colour sections drafted out twice as long as the centre colour (and appeared half as frequently). For this reason, each of the main reds took turns to be placed in the centre section - another factor that added to the complexity of my final yarn. In this animated gif you can see that I draft the fibres from the same spot four times before moving onto the next section. If this was a traditional fractal yarn, this would be the ply spun from the least divided hand-painted top section, and the ply with the longest colour areas. Here's the fibre for the third ply after it's been drafted off my hackle. Hopefully, you can see that the colour sections are much longer than in the previous two plies. Three full Nano bobbins, ready to ply! It's really quite exciting, not knowing how my yarn is going to turn out! Even after I'd plied it on my Hansencrafts Minispinner, I didn't truly get a feel for how well the colours were going to work together until I'd wound it into a skein... Ta-da! What do you think?! I absolutely love it! I love how, from across the room, it looks like a heathered, deep red colour with pink stripes running through it, but when you get a little closer, there are so many more colour combinations in there. I’m actually quite pleased that my original two yarns were slightly disappointing. I’m not sure I would have had the patience to do all of that blending to design my ideal complementary yarn otherwise. So often I write tutorials, partly to share my techniques, but mostly so that I can look back at my notes in the future and remind myself how I did something at a later date. I do wonder if this is yet another of my tutorials where I’m the only person that is actually bonkers enough to give it a go? This is quite an extreme example of my complex fractal concept. Of course, not all of the colours need to be blended by hand and you don’t necessarily have to change the colour arrangement with every ply. It could just be a way of using up your stash of dyed wool to create a unique fractal yarn for a fraction of the price of buying hand painted top. Please do let me know if you try out my complex fractal technique. It would really make my day! If you've found this post interesting or useful, please pin it to Pinterest. It makes a big difference to me and helps other spinners find it too. If you'd like to be updated when I post a video version of this blog post please follow my YouTube channel. At this point, I normally suggest similar related blog posts, however, my list of spinning-related content is becoming a little unmanageable... If you'd like to read more blog posts about spinning and fibre preparation, please take a look at this page here where you will find links to all of my spinning and fibre articles. Thank you for reading, and happy spinning! --- You may be interested in some of my other spinning-related blog posts - 9 Different Ways of Spinning a Multicoloured Blend While Trying to Avoid 'Spinning Mud' Spinning into Focus Chain-Plying at the Wheel Versus Making a Chain-Plied Ball Blending and Spinning a Rainbow Yarn 2 Ways Linear Blending a Gradient Hackle Blending a Long Gradient Using a Blending Board to blend a Repeatable Sweater Quantity How to Measure Handspun Yarn Using an App Free Handspun Yarn Labels Spinning Dog Hair DIY Hackle DIY Mini Wool Combs 3D Printed Modular Lazy Kate Yarn Gauge Reference Tool for Hand Spinners Testing the Electric Eel Wheel Yarn Counter Prototype Spinning Supercoil Yarn Using Waste Fibres Unbiased Review of the Daedalus Sparrow Testing the LWS Autowinder for the Electric Eel Wheel 6 ---------- Please be sweet and share the love. Leave a comment, subscribe to my YouTube channel, like my Facebook page for regular updates or follow me on Pinterest, Bloglovin' or Instagram