Spinning Study Group Part One

I've joined a Spinning Study Group with 8 friends from the Monashee Spinners group. We will be exploring ‘colour in spinning’ rather than spinning for perfection or size or anything like that. The way this group was set up, thanks to Rosalie, was really very inventive and thoughtful. Each person was asked to get a copy of Deb Menz’s book Spinning for Colour and to read it before the first meeting which was in September. A few days prior to the meeting Rosalie emailed a questionnaire to everyone asking them to pick out one or two exercises from the book and to figure out what was needed in the way of fibre, dyes etc to perform the exercise.

At our first meeting in September the outline of the study group was set out – we would meet once a month – we even agreed on each date for the entire 9 months of the study – and we agreed to omit a meeting in December as everyone's frantic at that time.

Each person read the exercise out loud to the group and we had a short general discussion about what we felt the exercise entailed and we put a post-it note on the page. Surprising how often more than one of us had the same choice.

Since the book seemed to be set out sequentially, we decided to start at the first exercise chosen and give it to the month of October and so on through to the end of the book. Needless to say we are not coming anywhere close to covering every exercise in the book.

So my homework for the month of October was Chapter 1 exercises 17, 18 and 19.

Here is my take on exercise 17(a) Contrast of Saturation. Choose a colour and combine it with any of its tints, shades or tones in a single yarn. I chose periwinkle blue and blended it with black to create it's shade, then plied pure periwinkle with the shade.
Exercise 17(b) Contrast of Saturation. Choose a colour then find another colour to make it brighter, and another to make it duller. I chose green, then added yellow to make it brighter and then purple to make it duller.Exercise 18 Contrast of Proportion. Choose several colours and combine them in Goethe’s proportions. Goethe assigned numbers to each colour and you combine proportionately. Yellow=3, Orange=4, Red=6, Violet=9, Blue=8, Green=6. My colours were violet, blue and green in the above proportions. This is a complete epiphany!
Exercise 19 Colour Harmonies. Create yarn using some of the colour harmonies. My first harmony was complementary , violet and green in equal proportions. Then I did a split complementary harmony and chose violet, green and red in equal proportions. My last harmony was a triad and I chose yellow, blue and red in equal proportions. On the triad, you can truly see why yellow should be used in small amounts when blending colours for spinning; overpowering or what! I'm really looking forward to next month when we explore painting colour on roving.