Color Wrap Challenges and Happier Things

 Sometimes I find myself struggling to make a project work.  The color wrap to the left is like that.  What I think I want, what I see, and what I understand just haven't pulled together right yet.

With projects like this, I have found that stepping away and letting the project rest is good.  So, while I'm resting I'll share some things that have brought a smile to my face recently.

Kumihimo braids.  These two braids were made by my youngest daughter.  Her instructor was her oldest sister.  The yarns are all thrums.  We spent a fun hour one snow day going through my thrums finding yarns for both girls to use.  Oh, and the "extra" loops on these bracelets are for my daughter's thumbs.  Don't ask me why, but that's how she likes to wear them--on her wrist and on her thumb!

While the girls have been braiding, I have been spinning cotton.  This is one of Robin Edmundson's dyed rovings spun and plied into a 2-ply yarn.  I may even have a project for this instead of just a spot in my handspun cotton box!  I love Robin's colors and fiber preparations.  This was wonderful to spin, and I love the bright, cheery greens especially since we are in the middle of cold and snow!

This next photo is a project in the development phase.  I blended some of the bright pink silk with two colors of alpaca and spindle spun it to see if I would like the yarn....I think they are lovely yarns and I would like to weave a shawl with these.  Maybe it would be mostly brown with three narrow white bands at one edge woven in an all-over crepe twill.  Maybe it will become something else!  I need to make final decisions as to how much silk to blend with the alpaca.  I'm leaning towards 20% by weight silk to alpaca.

Swimming in Color

My colorful warp is off the loom.  It was a wonderful vacation project!  I ended up with a long sampler (~20"), a table runner, and two very different scarves.  Weaving with color has been lots of fun!

The table runner and sampler were sett at 24epi.  The warp for the runner is a black slub cotton.

 The scarves were sett at 20 epi.  Here is the short one on my model.  The warp threads were used as wefts on this piece.

The other scarf used left over yarn from Mountain Meadow Wool.  I won a prize from them in the "Look, Ma, No Sleeves" contest that Handwoven ran a few years ago.  One of the yarns (there are two light brown wools being used as alternate picks for weft) has alpaca and the other has bison blended with wool.  I think that I may get this scarf, but I'm not sure yet!

 

Color..Kersplash!

Do you ever feel like you're a novice swimmer jumping into the deep end when it comes to color?  Me too!  I'm on a new color journey (swim?). Here's where things stand:

The beginning.
I went shopping at my friend Robin Edmundson's etsy shop.  I love her colors for cotton roving and finally decided to buy a color I've been eyeing for months!  While looking around, I discovered she had yarn grab bags for sale as well and you chose them by color family:  "bright cool", "bright warm", "earthy cool", "earthy warm".  I don't know about you, but there are times when I want to choose every last color in a piece and other times when I just want someone to fill my bag with pretty crayons and let me play (without having to think about which crayons got put in the bag!).  So, I purchased a "bright warm" grab bag.

This is what I have left after winding a warp.  There are two fine cotton boucle yarns (~24wpi), one cotton with a binder (~24 wpi), a rayon boucle (~22 wpi), and a nylon ribbon.  They are lovely yarns!  I have woven with the fine cotton boucle before when I won one of Robin's give-aways a year ago.  The trick with this group of yarns was how to use them in my color-limited way and have them look fun, nice, and well, awesome ('cause the colors are beautiful!).

So here's what I found:  Celeste Pryde has an article in the March/April 2000 issue of Handwoven magazine where she discusses weaving a Bronson Lace "log cabin" with multiple colors.  She uses silks instead of cottons, but the color use is fascinating!  She winds mini-warp bundles--enough ends for one of her two lace blocks (24 ends in this case)--and each mini-warp has two contrasting yarns.  The contrast can be color, texture, value...or even no contrast!  For a 28" wide piece she wound ~17 of these mini-warps.

So, I'm going to try it.  I had already played around with some of my 10/2 cotton yarns, looking to find similar color combinations as this grab bag from Robin.  I pulled out all the yarns.  I made yarn pairs--most of them were contrasts of color and texture--and I wound 9 mini-warp bundles and hung them over a cupboard door.

Here they are.  I've been moving them around and taking photos of them.  I knew I wouldn't be able to remember which order I liked if I didn't document them somehow!  I pulled my husband into the project and he suggested one of these orders and I really like it.

 But, check out what happens when I grey scale these photos to look at the color values:

The color order in the top left is a gradual shift from a dark value to a light and back to dark.  None of the other value shifts are as smooth.  The middle two have a shift, but there is a more abrupt dark to light shift from the left moving to the right.  The upper left color order is currently hanging on the cupboard door.  I'll look at it again tomorrow and hopefully warp a loom!

Color Work--Photo as Inspiration

The new hat in use with the brim turned up.

 This past spring I taught a color blending class at "The Fiber Event" in Greencastle, IN.  The first part of the class was mixing a 12-color color wheel from three primary colored wools (red, blue, & yellow).  The second part was blending colors taken from a printed/photo source.


My inspiration was a postcard from Kenai Fjords, Alaska.    After identifying the various colors in the photo (I ignored the text colors), I discovered that there were too many colors and narrowed my focus on the seals and the rock where they are sunbathing.

At this point, my notes become extremely sketchy!  The basic process is that I used the colors I saw in the photo to choose my rovings, blended the rovings into rolags and spun them into the yarns I used.  My choice of knitting patterns (this is based on the "Golden Pear" baby hat from ravelry) adds some extra blending as two colors are used to knit a transition area between the single color segments.

Going mostly by memory and what I see in the yarn, the rocks at the bottom of the photo are represented by the dark brown at the band of the hat. They are a combination of a natural brown wool, Romney wool dyed black, and maybe some grey wool. The mossy rocks above the seals were interpreted by blending the same natural brown wool used for the previous rocks, but blended with some green dyed wools (and maybe other colors...I really don't remember the details as well as I would like!).  The seals in the sun are represented by the copper and cream band of the hat.  I blended copper colored mohair top with cream colored fibers, probably undyed Romney.  I intentionally limited the amount of blending so that the resulting yarn has lots of color variation, mimicking the dappled effects of the light on the seals

 

For me, letting go of the literal imagery of the photo was a challenge.  I wanted to create seals and rocks!  It was hard to let go of that and I know that no one else will see the seals on the rock in this hat, but when I look at it, I remember the source for the color combination and I can see the seals. 

Color Blending for Fiber Artists

I was thrilled to have students sign up to take my color blending class at the Fiber Event this year.  My four students blended their own 12-hue color wheel, each color blended from combinations of red, blue, and yellow.  We spent some time identifying colors in photographs and discussing different ways to use those colors in a fiber project.  It was a fun class!  A big "thank you" to all my students!

Supplies ready to go for the Color Blending class at The Fiber Event.

Here are some photos from a color blending project I finished this week and took to show my class.  The little baggies in the center contain fibers.  The bag on top were the original colors.  The lower bag are the colors after I blended them.  I ordered the original colors into an approximate color wheel and then blended each color with some of the colors to each side of it.  50% of the blend is the "main color"; 25% of the blend is from the adjacent colors.  I love how blending the colors ties them together!

The scarf is a modification of the pattern "Wingspan" from Ravlery.  It was once a free pattern, but has been expanded and is no longer free.  I liked having the information on how to tweak the pattern that is included in the paid version.  The scarf is a series of shifted triangles which gives it a tendency to curve.  It didn't take much to make the scarf into a circle for this photo! -- The cast on color is the red; the cast off color is the red-purple.

Here's a closeup of the colors of the Merino fibers.  As dyed on top; as blended on the bottom.

A Little Bit of Lots of Stuff

The above photo is of a baby blanket woven for some friends.  The warp is a burgundy color, the pattern weft is a light pink (both in 10/2 cotton) and the tabby weft is a wool/angora/nylon yarn that I recycled from a sweater dress and is dark purple.  I love the hand of the blanket!  The recycled yarn softens the hand of the crackle weave significantly!

Check out these little samples:

 They are about an inch and a half tall by one inch wide.  I'm doing a custom piece for an individual and we needed to determine color order for the stripes.  I had wound a larger piece before I realized that maybe the colors should be in a different order and started winding the tiny tests.  Well, after the fifth tiny test I had found a combo that I liked and paused for a moment to run some calculations.  With five colors the number of color combinations are 5! (five-factorial), which equals 120 possibilities!  Half of them are reflections of each other--ABCDE is the same as EDCBA, which brings the number down to 60 possibilities.  Gasp!  Still to many to manage!  My fiber enabler came to the rescue and did some programing so that I could see all sixty color combinations.  Whew!  What a challenge!

Here's another little project on my first structo loom:

 It's a plaid fabric for Conner Prairie.  They are working on recreating a piece and this is one of many plaids that will become a part of the finished project.
This is how it looked going on the loom:

And, just because I'm excited about it, check out the new little structo that has come to stay at my house!  This is not the one being used to weave the plaid, it's another one.  :)  I keep hoping that one day I will find a way to teach weaving, so I am starting a collection of these little looms. 

Art in Icing

These are a couple of scoops of buttercream frosting with gel dyes in them (we were getting ready for decorating Christmas cookies! :)

Blue and red for purple:

Blue and yellow for green:

Yellow and red for orange:

I used a lot of dye this year and the colors blended beautifully!  They look streaky here, which I love, but they did mix well and made great cookie icing!  Hooray for beautiful colors in life!

Fabric Crayon Tests

 One of the things I inherited from my grandmother was this package of fabric crayons.  They mostly hang out in one of the drawers in my craft room.  Every now and then, they come out to play!    (The first time I ever used them was to color on a white t-shirt that we picked up at a garage sale.  The colors washed right out!  It was terrible, especially with a young child looking over my shoulder!  Then I re-read the instructions, re-colored the shirt, and set the color with an iron.  The shirt is still colorful today!)
  

Recently, the crayons got to come out and play with some dark fabric.  First I had to do  burn test to identify the fiber content.  Interpreting burn tests (hold small bit of fabric in tweezers or tongs over the flame of a candle.  How does it burn?  What does it smell like?  How does the ash behave?--Do a google search if you need more details.) is not my strong suit, but I learned enough to trust that there is some synthetic component to this dark fabric.  Whew!  The crayons need 50% or more polyester in the fabric to adhere well.    Time for a coloring test.  

I had two tests to run.  Test #1 was determining what color the crayons would be on the dark fabric.  Orange on white is definitely orange, but on a dark color it's harder to know how it will look.  So I drew letters with each crayon and colored them in.  Orange was "o", yellow was "y", etc.  "bs" is burnt sienna and "?" is a color that had no wrapper/label.  Test #2 was a color transfer test.  The instructions for the crayons indicate that you can color on paper, turn the paper colored side to the fabric, and iron it onto the fabric.  So I tried it--and it worked!  Go figure!  The transferred images are not as dark as the ones where I colored directly on the fabric, but they weren't bad at all!

More Needle Felting

 It all started when I hung up my collection of needle felted ornaments and my oldest daughter said, "They are so cute!".  I suggested that she could make some...  So she found a cat image online and printed it out and needle felted it.  It only took an hour and a half start to finish!  Isn't it cute!

While the cat was being made my youngest (who is almost seven) requested a Dalmatian puppy for her baby doll.  I had her fish out our copy of 102 Dalmatians and set to work.  By the time the cat was finished, a little puppy had appeared on the scene!  The baby doll (and daughter) were pleased!

 We had a beautiful morning with sun on the cornfield recently.  The photo doesn't do the real colors justice, but I took it as a reminder of the different colors of brown turning to gold and then blending with the colors in the sky.  It was really pretty!

And, a friend purchased a bunch of sweaters, yarn, and unfinished sweaters from a yard sale that a friend of hers was having.  I went shopping at my friend's and came home with a big bag of yarns and two unfinished sweaters to unravel.  This one is a mercerized cotton in a cabled yarn.  I'm hopping to weave this into simple cloth (probably plain weave) just to see how the cabled yarn looks.

Color and Dye Class with Robin Edmundson

Shetland wool

 Robin Edmundson gave a class on color theory and acid dyeing last weekend at St. Mary of the Wood's White Violet Center.    I had a great time!

My favorite part of the class is the way my brain started to reel as I tried to grasp some of Albert Munsell's color theory.  The main idea is to imagine a sphere with the named colors (red, yellow, green, etc.) running around the equator.  At the top of the sphere the colors fade to white.  At the bottom, they fade to black.  From the skin of the sphere towards the center line the colors loose intensity, fading to greys.  I got most of that.  It was when they skewed the sphere that my brain started to hurt! (At some point I'll get a copy of "The New Munsell Student Color Set" and work on that skewing some more!

In the mean time, I have been merrily cutting photos out of magazines and pasting them onto color scheme pages.  Deciding what to do with the color schemes and my dyes is yet to come!

Cascade 220--not quite cardboard-esq

 This skein of yarn (cascade 220) and the shetland roving above were both dyed with stripes of intense color unevenly mixed with stripes of less intense color.  I was aiming to reproduce the shadow effects in a photograph of a stack of corrugated cardboard.  Both dye jobs failed.  Drat!

The shetland is a very orange, almost coppery.  It's actually a pretty color and I like it...it's just not cardboard-esq.  The skein of yarn suffered from an overfull dye pot.  It had to sit on the counter for 30 minutes or more and the colors wicked at different rates, breakin the brown into yellows and greens. Dooh!  It's a great chromatography experiment and maybe a bit like camouflage, but not cardboard colored.  I'll have to try again later!

firestar

 Robin gave each of the students a few extras to play with.  This is some firestar, a nylon fiber that shimmers.  I dyed it with red, orange and yellow.  It's pretty!  I also have some nylon ribbon that I dyed in the same colorway.  Yum!

Mohair/acrylic blend

This was a test dye job.  I have some leftover cones of acrylic/mohair yarn.  I wanted to see if they would take the dye.  They did!  The yellow in the center of the photo is the original color of the yarn.  The orange/red is the dyed mohair.  The black...well, that's dye from the dark blue sample I was trying to overdye.  Now I know that I can dye the mohair blend...and I should not trust the dark blue dye!

gradient in blues and greens

This last skein, also Cascade 220, was dyed twice.  In class I used green and blue green, a bit of yellow and a touch of light blue.  I also intentionally kept a section of the skein undyed.  After it came out of the dye pot, it looked awful!  There was such contrast between the deep greens and blue-greens and the natural yarn!  Yuck!

When I got home I set up a sun dye pot and added some dilute "brillant blue" and black.  The result was a lovely dusty blue on the natural section of the skein which is significantly less jarring that the natural was!

What a fun and informative class!  Many thanks to Robin and the folks at the White Violet Center!

Evolutions

I came across these "evolutions" at Twisted Fiber Art's website the other day.  I love the transitions from one color to the next and I love how the overall color progresses without returning to the original color.  This particular colorway reminds me of the blue sky over sand hills.

I'm not sure how I want to use this ideas in my own dyeing.  I usually dye rovings (which Twisted Fiber Art will also dye into evolutions), but I'm not sure if I really need to put all those colors on the same roving to get this type of end result.  In theory, I could just spin light blue and then purple and then dark brown and then tan and then yellow without having to have dyed them together.

Sarracenia leucophylla hybrid (aka Pitcher Plant)

While I think about that, here is a photo from KathyW's Web Space.  Check out the color evolution/gradation in the flower petals!

Color and Beads

Working with Laura Bryant's "A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color" I need to work on sorting colors by weight. I tried this recently with sewing thread. Here is another take using perler beads. (What can you say when your little one wants you to play with her? You say "yes" and make the play an exercise with color! :)

To the left is my finished sorting. The heavy colors are on the left; the light colors on the right.

I must admit that I used the camera as a crutch for this exercise. I took black & white photos of my work at various stages, looking through the lens of the camera to see which bead colors were registering closer to black and therefore "heavier".




Here is the purple board with only black beads on it. There are some very dark beads on the lid/bead tray, but they are not black. I think they are mostly dark brown, grey, and dark purple.















Here is the purple board with lots of beads on it. At one point I discovered that I had too many "heavy" colors on the board and took out three rows of beads and scooted the lighter colors to the left. I don't remember if that was before or after this photo.















This arrangement of colors was just for play. The colors are still in a heavy (left edge) to light (right edge) order, but I have grouped them so that the beads of each hue are together. I like the colors all mixed together, as in my first photo, better.

I'm still not sure where I will take this color work. I'm unsure of how it translates to weaving. --It's nice to have more to learn! :)

Color!

My family got me some videos for Mother's Day. I've been contemplating purchasing Laura Bryant's video for some time now. It was easy to put it on the list of things I wanted for Mother's Day.

The Deb Menz video came out just a short time before Mother's Day. It was a complete and utter "drool! I'd like that!" entry on my list.

And now, they are both in my library.

I watched some of Laura Bryant's video for the second time today. She spends a lot of time explain how to group yarns by color "weight". This is similar to value with grey scale, but a little more involved. The trick is that I'm still trying to grasp how to use the weight-grouped yarns most effectively. Laura talks about this in the video, I just haven't gotten the key points clear in my head yet. One of the challenges seems to be whether the goal is a color effect or a structure effect. The two things require different uses of the yarns. (I think I need to go watch the video again!)



Color Works for Spinners is by Deb Menz and I loved it! I have had a copy of her book Color in Spinning for a few years and enjoy it. This video is like a live action addendum to the book. Deb is fun to listen to, she is encouraging, and she blends fiber to create amazing colors. It has been very hard to not drag out the drum carder! I want to blend colors! I want to make pretty batts!




I'm enjoying my new videos!

Color Exercises

Interweave Press recently release the DVD "A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color" with Laura Bryant. They've posted a teaser on their site (http://www.interweavestore.com/Weaving/DVDs-Videos/A-Fiber-Artists-Guide-to-Color-DVD.html).

It's a good teaser. I watched it and was really excited about it. But, I'm not sure yet about fiber art instruction via videos. It turns out I love books. I devour books. I slurp them up and then go back and nibble on the good parts. And the good parts change from day to day or month to month.

After I got excited about this video, I started some research. Who is Laura Bryant? What else has she made/produced/written? It turns out that she is a fiber artist--she weaves & knits & dyes--and one of her specialties is color. My library is part of a fantastic interlibrary loan system. Today I picked up two of Laura's books "The Yarn Stash Workbook" and "Knitting with Novelty Yarns" (by Laura & Barry Klein). Page 6 of the workbook has photos similar to the dvd trailer. She discusses taking a crazy mix of color and making some order out of it.

So, I tried it.

I have a collection of my grandmother's sewing thread (I use it...slowly, but I use it). Here is a random tray of yarns:















Then, I tried getting all the light colors to the left and all the "heavy" (dark) colors to the right:














I realized that I was tending to group the threads by color as well as light/heavy, so I intentionally tried to group them in lines of color.
















It was a good exercise. Laura comments, "Artists spend years training their eyes to detect fine nuances in weight between colors..." I'm not trained yet, but I'm getting started! :)