Marine Multi-Marle

This blog has recently been dominated by pink-purple tones. The blue-green range is another favourite of mine. This morning, while some of the pink-purple yarns were soaking and rinsing. I mixed up this multi-marle combination on my big table.

This time I have eight different colours, though it is hard to distinguish them all in the picture.

On my colour-to-do list is a hand-dyed wool colour wheel for reference purposes. I'd also like to challenge myself to do an interesting brown colour-way. I'm not immediately attracted to the natural colours, but they don't have to be dull. 

Colour Blending

I've been spinning up these sea greens today.

One hundred grams done and one hundred grams to go. It's a while since I've played with these multi-marle combinations. I used a similar yarn for my recent ruffled garter stitch scarf, but these colours are darker. I have to confess, I couldn't really remember which coloured tops I'd used, so I just had a stab at it. I'm hoping they will match well enough to make a hat to go with the scarf.

Lotus Blossum Skein

Here it is: It's got the flecky look of the multi-marle technique, so of course it won't look like a lotus blossum when it's knitted up. But my intention was simply to be inspired by the colour combination. I'm pretty happy with the way the hints of orange-yellow and green come through quite subltly.

Have You Any Wool

My next consignment to CCCK--the wool shop in Northcote--is well and truly overdue. While I've been going crazy with quilt-making they have been selling a steady trickle of my handspun wool. I spoke with Andrea there yesterday to tidy up my teaching schedule. I'm going to have to fit in at least two more quilting courses this year! But I want to make sure I keep up my knitting and crochet classes too, so I had to do some clever juggling with my calendar. Anyway, Andrea said they could really do with more of my yarn, which is a nice problem to have. So I sat at my spinning wheel a while longer than usual yesterday, and this morning I have this to show: Two bobbins of multi-marle merino in sea-spray colours. I have to do some quilting today, but I'll intersperse it with plying up this wool--both activities can be hard on my muscles if I do them continuously, so hopefully if I alternate the two I'll be ok. There are already a few skeins in the CCCK box, so this will give me a couple more. Then all I have to do is get my paperwork organised. The final quilting class in this course is tomorrow night, so I should be right.

Colour Mixing--Multi-Marle

Remember this . . .

. . . a photo I took in January of a tree in the rain. I was drawn to the freshness of the colours and the texture of the creamy white blossoms. I took that idea and chose some coloured tops: three shades of green and a natural white. I stripped down the tops and laid them side by side ready to spin:
This is my multi-marle approach to colour mixing. Here's how it looks on the bobbin today.
It's quite high twist, so I'm thinking of plying it back onto a fine commercial wool yarn. I hope the texture as well as the colour combination will pick up some of my feeling about the photo.

Silver Princess Blended Merino Skeins

Here's the kind of thing I have in mind when I say, "these are my Australian Colour selections for today":
These are Silver Princess colour blends I did last year. The Silver Princess is one of my favourite trees and I have a collection of photos I've taken of the tree itself and its flowers. I've made the photos up into a poster for my wall. Then I've used that as inspiration for some merino multi-marle colour blends. I choose a variety of related colours and mix the colours as I spin. This gives me a colour blend that is textured and vibrant. It's quite different from what I can achieve with my dyepot.