How Many Colors are in that Yarn?

A painter mixes paints on a palette to produce the right shade of blue for ocean waters. When I want to capture the multi-hued brown feathers of a shorebird like the one above, I blend dyed wool, spinning it into yarn.

What are the advantages of spinning my own yarn? First, a yarn spun from several hues is richer than a flat single solid color yarn. The feathers on Shorebird Peril are not just brown. They are rose, orange, chestnut, and gold.

The painter Vincent Van Gogh knew that placing bits of colors next to each other would create a rich impression. He studied Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s color theory. This French chemist explained the effects created when different colored strands of yarn were woven next to each other in tapestries. Van Gogh kept a box of yarns that he used to experiment with different color combinations.

Second, though commercial yarns come in hundreds of colors, they may not be available in the color and thickness that I need for a particular sculpture. When I spin my own yarn, I can determine the color and the thickness. It can be bulky or light, chunky or smooth. I am not subject to the style decisions of the yarn company’s designers.

I start with dyed wool, sometimes mixed with silk or mohair to add shine to catch the light. For a blue-green yarn subtly streaked with yellow, I might choose wools in six hues ranging from yellow to green to blue. 

Before I twist these fibers into yarn on my spinning wheel, I stack them in layers of fluffy carded batts. If I stack equally thick layers of different colors, the final yarn will have equal proportions of each color. If I substitute a striped batt, like the tri-colored one I am pulling off the drumcarder here, for one of the solid color layers, then this color will be less predominant. 

Once all the colored batts are stacked in a pile, I roll them into a log. Viewed from the end, the colors will show up in repeating concentric circles of color, like the circles of cake and filling in a jelly roll.

This fat log is much too thick to spin, so I elongate it by pulling it gently into a roving. Here is a roving pulled from batts of cream, two shades of green, and two shades of blue wool.

At this stage, the roving is ready to be twisted into yarn on the spinning wheel. But there are more decisions to make. The yarn can be spun into a thick single strand, or into thin strands that are plied together. The thinner the yarn and the greater number of strands plied together, the more the colors will intertwine. As they intertwine optical blending makes them appear as new blurred colors.

Here is a bobbin showing a single strand of spun yarn. You can see how the stripes of green and red-violet in the roving become more subtle as they are thinned out in the yarn. This yarn was made from batts of green stacked with the striped batt from image 2 above.

The only way to really know how the yarn will look once it is knitted is to knit a test swatch. Here is the yarn that I made from the six colors in image 1. I spun two bobbins from the same roving and then them together. The yellows, greens, and blues twisted with each other to create random combinations. Sometimes green twisted against green, sometimes it twisted against yellow or blue. The effect of this yarn is solid from a distance, but many colors up close.

The result is a richer color than the solid color commercial yarn shown next to it. Both yarns have their place, and by spinning my own, I can choose the one that best captures the mood or image I want.

For an excellent reference book with detailed guidance on combing colors in yarn, check out Color in Spinning by Deb Menz published by Interweave Press.