September, 1998: The Big Blue Ball
Blending variegated roving on a drum carder
Deborah Menz has a new book out titled Color in Spinning. It's available at http://www.amazon.com for $27.97 plus shipping. Color in Spinning is about making beautiful variegated yarns, and her techniques definitely work. The method I tried first is layering different colored batts from a drum carder, pulling the giant batt into a thin, multicolored ribbon of roving, and then spinning it.
I dyed many colors of yarn (using MANY colors is a Menz principle, 12 to 40; she likes the complexity of the final fabric) and picked out seven, using twice as much navy blue as the others; that is, one part of each color except the powerful yellow (light colors work harder in a blend so I only used half as much yellow), but two parts of navy. I used navy, green, grape, yellow, light green, teal, and skyblue. So I made a big batt of each (two of navy) and piled them on top of each other. I then Z-stripped vertically all the batts together. These were BIG strips of wool. Holding the strip hard between my two hands, I pulled carefully, attenuating the wool but never pulling it apart. I went end to end repeatedly, pulling and repulling, and the layered colors got thinner and thinner, but all continued to be represented.
As the roving became a spinnable thinness, I rolled it into the Herculean ball of multicolor wool in the illustration, above. I spun it and there was 10 oz. of singles of thickish sports weight yarn, so I made the short-sleeve top illustrated below, using some commercial navy yarn for the borders. The whole thing weighs about 12 oz, surprisingly little.
