Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Color Blending

The Sweater II is coming along nicely-- I spent the last few nights in the hotel room weighing out colored fiber (notice the new antique balance on the left).

I added each color one at a time to the carder


After removing the batt with all the layers of color, I folded it in half lengthwise so that the red alpaca fiber was sandwiched in the middle between the different colored wool. Because it has a different texture than wool, the alpaca has a harder time blending with the rest of the fiber. It seems to blend better if sandwiched between two layers of wool.

The batt was carded a second time.
Believe it or not, this is the finished color! Notice how all the balls match pretty well. This was near impossible (I tried) to achieve without a scale. For example each ball is a blend of 2 grams of lime green, 2 grams of bright blue, 1.5 grams of dark blue, 1 gram of seafoam green, 1 gram of yellow and 0.5 grams of red.

I still have a lot more fiber to blend so it will probably be a few more weeks before moving on to the next stage!

2 comments:

Jeana Marie said...

It looks like it came out really well! was it what you were expecting?
Jeana

Karen said...

Um....kinda sorta! I wanted a manly forest green and it turned out a olive/forest green. But I decided that it still is a forest green, it's just an east coast forest green rather than a west coast, pine tree forest green. :-)