Lost in a colour wheel

You might be wondering where I am with my Master Spinners homework. Well, I am stuck in a viscous circle - the twelve colour wheel circle. It is not hard, nor boring, nor tedious, it is just taking time. The assignment: Create a colour wheel. It requires weighing each colour, then blending colours equally by weight, then spinning them and finally create a colour wheel. Here's how it works: take three primary colour merino roving - yellow, blue and red. Blend each of the primary colours with another primary to get three more colors, eg. red + blue = violet. Keep in mind that the new blend has to be homogeneous - blended very carefully, striped colours will be rejected. So I card very careful using the drum carder, running the new blend through the drum 3 - 4 times. Then take the new colour (or, figure out the correct portions of the primary colours that produced the new colour and add to it to et the new colour - you can see where this is getting confusing) and blend with the primary on each side eg. violet + blue = violet/blue, violet+red= ...hey wait a minute, what does that make and where is it? Excuse me while I card more wool....

Variations on a theme

This is the kayaking that I didn't do on the weekend. I got all geared up to go but a phone call at the last minute had me taking someone to town in the motorboat. So Mark went out and took this picture.

Here is another picture of some samples I did with a skein of wool/alpaca/mohair. The colours are brighter than they appear here. All skeins are plied and have one or two singles from the same skein. Some have a single added from another dye scheme. So these samples are really variations on a theme (the keystone colour). Furthest to the right is a 'fractal' spun skein which spreads the colours so they rarely match up. The skein second from the left is Navajo Plied to keep the colours together. So if you compare skein 2 with skein 5, they are both from the same colour dye, yet appear very different. The others are variations on the theme.

Colour Tools

I've recently found a few colour resources on the web to help design colourways and palates. The first one is colour palette generator, a great program for analyzing an online image and producing a colour palette from it. Here's the results of my Blog header image (see the top of the page).

Colour blender lets you input two colours and the number of midpoints (colours) you want between the two and it will output the colours needed to blend colour #1 with colour #2.


Peter Piper's Color Palette Picker is another great tool. I can see weavers flocking to this one for summer and winter weaves.