‘Spinning into Focus’ Technique 7 - Using a Blending Board to Spin a Less Blended Yarn

This video accompanies my blog post on a technique that I’m calling “Spinning into Focus”. It’s a method for spinning a commercially available multicoloured blended top, breaking it down into 7 - 9 yarns, each yarn becoming less blended and more colourful than the previous yarn.

If you'd like to read a little more about the yarns I spun, I've written about this yarn in this blog post - https://www.craftmehappy.com/2023/04/...

The idea is that this method can be used to spin yarn for a sweater, scarf, or any large item using several techniques, and you will have a garment where the colours start off muddy, and appear to come into focus as they work their way up, down or across the garment.

Full disclosure - I told John Arbon Textiles about my Spinning into Focus Technique and they very kindly sent me a sweater quantity of fibre to demonstrate my method with. I haven't been compensated financially to use their fibre.

I’m going to use ‘Slack Ma Girdle’ from @JohnArbonTextile’s Appledore range for all of the yarns in this series. The blended Appledore tops can be found here - https://www.jarbon.com/product/appled...

In this seventh technique, I'm placing a single layer of multi-coloured blended top on the blending board and drafting off 3 rolags. I'm not using the blending board to blend the colours, but paradoxically, as a means of converting the fibres into a format that allows for less colour blending in the final yarn.

All of the yarns in this series are chain-plied at the wheel with relatively short chains to try to maintain the original colours as much as possible.

In this video I'm spinning on the Electric Eel Wheel 6 which can be purchased at* -https://www.dreamingrobots.com/produc...

*I am a Dreaming Robots affiliate. If you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a small percentage of the purchase price at no additional cost to you. Any income from my blog goes a small way toward funding future craft projects.

You can read more about my technique here - https://www.craftmehappy.com/2023/04/...

Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
0:35 Breaking the multi-coloured top in to lengths the same length as the blending board
0:53 Opening up the top so that all of the colours sit next to each rather than on top of each other
2:30 Using a blending board brush to brush the top down onto the blending board
2:59 Rolling the rolags off the blending board with dowels
4:07 Image of lots of blending board rolags
4:17 Drafting out the blending board rolag
4:44 Close up of spinning from a blending board rolag
5:25 Time lapse of an Electric Eel Wheel 6 bobbin filling
5:54 Image of spun singles on an EEW6 bobbin
5:59 Image of the final chain-plied yarn

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