Carding & Spinning Color Studies

I took a fiber blending class with Jill Laski, owner of Ashland Bay Trading Co., at Black Sheep Gathering in 2008. I spun up samples for my notebook but had extra that I decided I wanted to play with now. We spent a day blending wool on our drum carders using the primaries - red, blue, yellow and the printer's primaries - magenta, turquoise, gold. What a fun day, and what fun color combinations we came up with - the colors have so much more depth being blended; for example a purple has so much more depth to it being combined out of red and blue rather than being dyed solid purple to start.

The samples above were a study using 3 colors and blending them in different ratios: blue, purple and chartruese. The Ashland Bay official color names are Colonial Wool 'Bluebell', Colonial Wool or Merino Wool 'Purple' and Merino Wool 'Dijon'.

The samples below are a purple color study. The original purple (no sample) was made from Merino or Colonial 'Red' plus 'Blue'. The samples below show it carded with white, with grey, with black and with it's complement yellow.

I'm not sure what I'll do with all these samples yet - have yet to measure yardage on them. I'll combine them in a small project like socks, hat or fingerless gloves - if I need some more fiber I'll spin up a solid to coordinate with them.

In in the evenings I'm working on some other colorway samples - will post them once they are spun.

Oh what fun this could be since I'm a dealer for Ashland Bay Trading Co. and have a multitude of colors here in stock ready to play with - all the possibilities! I sell them in one of my etsy shops.