Workshop: Tips for Colour Management

When I first started spinning, I lived in a tiny apartment with barely enough room for a spinning wheel, let alone a drum carder, blending board or even hand carders and living in the centre of a city meant that fleece wasn’t an everyday commodity. The most accessible fibre for me, both financially and in terms of actually getting hold of the stuff, was blended tops.

I was particularly partial to ‘humbug’ tops, where the different natural colours of a single breed, like Jacob or Shetland, are blended into a stripey top. But I noticed that, when I spun short forward draw from the end of the top, those colours were no longer distinct and just disappeared into a homogenous blend.

Later, as I started to learn how to handle fibre and draft in different. ways, I realised that those humbug tops were now coming out differently, more speckled or even a bit stripey in some cases.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been on a bit of a deep-dive into ways to spin blended tops to achieve the colours you want… without using any fibre prep tools.

I’m delighted to invite you to join a free workshop I’m hosting during the John Arbon Virtual Mill Open Weekend on the 8th and 9th July 2023 (my workshop’s on Sunday 9th). You’ll learn how to assess blended tops to see if they’re suitable for the yarn you have in mind, then we’ll look at different ways to manipulate the fibre and spin them to create the colour effects you want.

You can book a spot on the workshop here.

Ten of the many (many) samples you’ll see knitted up in this workshop. These are the Mill Open Weekend special tops in the colourway Borage.