Blending board fun

This afternoon instead of doing things I should be doing I decided to play with my blending board. I'm going to stop beating myself up for not focusing on my business all the time, it's the time to do more playing with less guilt involved.

I pulled out a bit of roving bits & bobs and separated them into color family piles

I put together an autumn color scheme including some bamboo, glitz and silk sari bits

Then I put together the blues, greens and purples along with bamboo and glitz

I decided to play with the blues, greens and purples randomly putting them on the board and then pulling off the rolags for future spinning

And this is as far as I got - there are 9 piles of rolags - 4 rolags in each pile/color order. This is approximately 1/2 pound. I still have a huge pile of roving on the floor waiting to be finished up which will probably make around 1 pound total of this colorway. Can't wait to start spinning it.

Pulling the rolags off did 'smart' my right thumb to my wrist. Recently I had to lay off knitting for a few weeks to let it recover but this has made it flare up again.  I've got to be more wary of repetitive tasks.

Wow

Ok, before you read my post go look at the video on Sharon's blog.....or do it later, whatever you want. I saw her post yesterday and thought wow this looks like great fun. This afternoon after I got back from my spinning group I had to give it a try.

I just pulled out some pieces of roving leftovers, layered them up like in the video, rolled them around the dowel into a rolag and eureka, a nice big long rolag to spin from. This is where you might want to go look at that video if you didn't already because I was so excited doing it I forgot to take pictures along the way.

And here I've started spinning up the sample. I love it, it's got quite a bit of black in it because that's what I was going for but pops of the colors throughout. I've been thinking about carding up a custom blend using black as the primary color but now I'm going to do this instead, using the drum carder would dilute it more than I want.

Thank you Sharon for taking that video during your spindle camp and sharing it with us all. Playing with this is sure to get anyone out of a funk. I would love to get my spinning group together to have a play day making these......and I certainly have the Ashland Bay roving in a ton of colors for us to play with.

More handspun color blending samples

Here are some more of the small skeins of color blending samples I spun up. These are all made from combining blue, red & brown in various combinations on the drum carder. I have one more small bag of samples to spin but they will wait a bit..........have a pile of small samples to spin up of Ashland Bay Merino/Tussah Silk, Merino Multi-Color, and Merino Solid rovings. These are all from an order recieved this past week - it helps so much for customers to see what a particular colorway looks like spun up so I'll do samples whenever I have the time and extra fiber.