Paintbox V Sequential Tops, Part 1

"How will this spin up?"

My customers sometimes ask me what their fibre might look like when spun up. When working with hand dyed top there are lots of factors that determine how a final yarn, and a final project, will look - from the choices made in splitting the top before spinning (spit it into lots of pieces? leave it as one?) to those made when plying the yarn at the end (3ply, 2ply, single?), it all makes a difference. What I'd like to show here is how the dyeing style, the bit *I* control, can affect how a project turns out.

I'm going to spin up two handdyed tops dyed in different styles and then knit the same project from each yarn. The dyeing styles I've picked couldn't be more different: one top is dyed with random splotches of colour throughout (I call this style "paintbox") and the other is dyed sequentially in repeating bands of colour. In order to let the dyeing shine through I need to eliminate all the variables I can, so I've decided to spin a singles yarn (no plying to think about), and I've decided to knit the same pattern with both yarns (making comparison easy)(hopefully).

Should be pretty cool to see how this turns out!

Here are the tops. Both are Blackbird Fibres. The first is eco-Falkland in the paintbox style, randomly dyed in pale yellow, green and tan. The second is oatmeal BFL sequentially dyed in repeating bands of dark purple, blue and gold.

There are two things dictating this spin - the final knitted pattern (let's call this A), and my dyeing style (let's call this B).

A) The pattern I am thinking of knitting, Citron, is half-circle shaped. The thing about shawls like Citron (and most other half-circle shawls, and triangular shawls too) is that these patterns start off with shorter rows and end with much longer rows.

B) The oatmeal BFL top has even sections of colour throughout, and these sections repeat. The thing about singles yarns spun from sequentially dyed tops is that the singles structure of the yarn preserves the colours of the top as they are, in the order they are, and repeating with the same frequency in the yarn as they do in the unspun top.

Taking these two things together, if the yarn I spin keeps these even sections of colour throughout at, say, 4 inches per colour, then as the half-circle gets larger and the rows get longer, the striping/pooling caused by these sections of colour will shift along with this growth - which means that near the cast on row, there will be large chunks of colour, and near the bind off there will be smaller chunks of colour. I want a visually even disbursement of colour throughout the shawl so, theoretically, I need a yarn that has colour sections that increase at the same rate the rows increase.

In short, if I want even stripes of colour throughout this shawl (which I do) I'm going to have to get a bit tricky with the spinning.

Clear as mud, right? ;) 

Stay with me, I think it will be pretty easy to do.

We've got the theory down - a yarn that has colour sections that grow along with the increase in row length - so, how can we get these increasing sections of colour in the final yarn? I'm going to try splitting the top lengthwise into different sized widths, leaving the colour order intact, but, by changing the thickness of the top, changing the amount of colour. If I arrange these three lengths by size and spin them in this order then I will hopefully have a yarn with sections of colour that increase as the yarn progresses.

I pulled off a thin strip of top, the long way, and then split the remaining top into two pieces, also the long way, with one about twice the thickness of the other. So, I ended up with three long pieces of top - one thin, one a bit thicker, and one a lot thicker.

Here they are.

 

For those following along at home, the ratio I was aiming for was 1:5:8. This choice wasn't entirely random - I looked at the number of stitches in the first section of Citron (33 sts), the number after the third section (177 sts) and the number at the fifth section (273 sts). I divided the second and third numbers by the first to get an idea of how much the rows increased in relation to each other. This told me the relative proportions I need in the yarn, i.e. how much longer each colour section in the yarn might need to be to maintain the same pooling effect throughout the shawl. (FYI, I could probably have looked at area, but my math isn't so strong anymore and it was easier for me to stick with length.) I plan to spin my pieces of top in order from smallest to largest so that my yarn has sections of colour that are in line with these ratios, or, in other words, at my cast off row the sections of colour will be (hopefully!) about 8 times longer than at my cast on row. Fingers crossed, eh!

I split the yellow top the same way last week and have finished spinning that one already. Since it was dyed in a paintbox style it doesn't necessarily need splitting in the same manner to even out the colours - the colours are fairly randomized anyways - but I am doing it so that both yarns are the same from start to finish. The purple top is dictating the method this time around. Maybe next time I'll let a paintbox top make the rules.

This is the beauty of spinning your own yarns. You want a self-striping yarn that keeps the same thickness of stripes over an increasing area? Totally possible with a little bit of forethought. You want a yarn that gets gradually thicker, or thinner, throughout the skein so that the gauge gradually changes throughout a project? Can't think what you'd use this for (maybe socks that are thicker at the foot than the leg?) but it's totally possible too.
 

I've never spun for the same length colour sections over a changing area before and I can't wait to see if it actually works!

Spin happy,
Maggie