Color for Spinners

Thanks for all of the wonderful birthday wishes.

My birthday had a bit of a rocky start. I started off slow opening gifts and giggling with my girls about how old I'm getting. Hubbo went to take them to Hebrew School and as I settled down with the newspaper to ponder breakfast it occurred to me to check the flyer to confirm the class time. Oooops! Class was supposed to start at 10 and here it was 9:30 with me still in pj's on the couch thinking about breakfast. Not good!

I rushed out of the house, grabbing coffee along the way. As I drove to Alexandria I noticed that my gas tank was enpty. Ack! Thankfully, after this things improved quite a bit.

We spent the first part of class hand blending specified proportions of white and black fiber to make greys for color cards. About a million years ago I was an art major so this was kind of familiar but it was really informative to see how the fiber behaved.

In the greys the results were pretty much what you'd expect but as we moved into blending the primary colors to get our green, orange and purple it was far more interesting. You could really see the way the different components in the dyes used on the fiber brought each other out. For example, the yellow we used had much more red in it so it didn't blend into a nice green but, when you put it together with the red fiber it created a lovely orange. The red was reacting with the red tones in the yellow fiber.

The hand blending was nifty but things got so much more interesting in the afternoon part of class when we got to "play" more. We used the hand cards and then got a demonstration on using hackles. All very cool stuff.

Finally we got to the drum carders. Ahhhh... drum carders. I may need one of these - fast! I may even be doing a fair amount of online research into them right now. Any preferences?

We started out with the basics of using the drum carders and how to load the fiber on and quickly progressed to creating stripes. The possibilities abound!

I started out by selecting a bit of red, a bunch of blue and a whole lot of white. It started out as you see it above but I kept feeding through the drum carder and little by little it got prettier and prettier. It's magical to watch the was the fiber blends. Just when I thought it couldn't get much better, our wonderful instructor, Sylvia, brought out the sparkly stuff in multiple colors and showed us the different effects it can produce. It was wild and so much fun. We did a lot of ooohing and ahhhing.

There were so many great options to choose from but I selected a pretty soft looking one that blended in a lot and just added a hint of sparkle. What do you think? It reminds me of my beloved lilies. Does it make anyone else think of impressionist paintings or is that just me?

I never thought I'd want to add the sparkly stuff to my fiber but this is really pretty. I can't wait to spin it up.