Colour Blending Workshop

On Saturday the theme of the Bradford Guild meeting was colour blending . Alison Daykin came to give us a talk and lead a workshop on the topic.

We'd been asked to bring a selection of fibre in the three primary colours plus black and white; an inspirational picture; our hand carders and a spinning wheel.

Being me I forgot my inspirational picture but luckily Alison had some to spare so I borrowed one of hers; a picture of the Australian outback.

The idea was to pick four or five colours from the picture and work out what proportions of the primaries we'd need to blend to get the fibre to match the colours as closely as possible.

From the picture I chose the reddish brown of the earth; the sage green of the brush; the dark green of the leaf shadows and the yellowish white stripe across the landscape.

Having chosen the colours we laid the correct proportions of the primaries onto the carders and blended the fibre 'till we had the correct shade. If the shade wasn't quite right we adjusted the quantities. These are my second lot of rolags; the first lot weren't quite right.

Once we were happy with the rolags we spun them up and roughly plied them. I was pretty pleased with the final results and when we put them all together on the table at the end it was surprising what a range of colours people had succeeded in achieving with a very limited initial palette.