Jun 29 2008
What I Learned at Estes, Day 1
A couple of weeks ago, I took some classes at the Estes Park Wool Market. The Thursday class was called ‘A World of Color: Yarn Design by Inspiration’. Since I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to work effectively with color, I was really excited about this class.
The class was geared toward teaching us how fiber can be blended to give you different color effects. The first thing we did was to create color wheels by taking the 3 primary colors - blue, yellow and red - hand carding them together and separately, then spinning the resulting rolags. Here are the results:
Color Wheel, Printer’s Palette
Color Wheel, Standard Palette
Each of the primary colors was used on its own, then each was blended with the other in different proportions using hand cards - 25%/75%, 50%/50%, and 75%/25% - to create the complete color wheel.
It was interesting to me to see how much variation you can get from pre-dyed rovings, simply by blending them together, and how the effect can differ quite substantially depending on how much time you are willing to spend in the carding process.
The second part of the class was devoted to taking a color photograph you liked, and trying to design a yarn based upon the colors in the photo. Unfortunately I didn’t get that far with this idea because I was just too tired by that point, but I’m going to try to use it for future inspiration.
My verdict on this class is that I learned a lot, but felt that the instructor covered a bit too much for a one-day class. If this was kept to the one-day format, I would have preferred to do just one color wheel and spend more time with creating yarn designs.
In any case, I learned a lot from this class and it’s given me a little more confidence to play more with color!
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