The Rainbow Connection

I mentioned the Wild Rose Retreat in a previous post. And I mentioned the workshop led by Colleen Hovey in using plying to combine colors. And I mentioned that I would post my results. So without further ado......


The Rainbow Ripple Scarf! Sit back from the monitor a bit and unfocus your eyes to get the best effect. :>) Yay for optical blending!
For those of you who were not there, I will offer a bit of an explanation of the technique. We were first invited to chose three colors from a big pile of baggies filled with Corriedale top. Being the clever bunny that I am, I chose printers primes--magenta (aka fuschia), cyan (aka jade), and yellow.

We then weighed out sections of the top, according to the clever little chart system that Colleen has devised. Then we spun each of the little weighed bits onto three bobbins in sequence. When three bobbins were filled, we plied, then refilled the empty bobbin with the next little weighed bit. We worked our way through the chart, simply spinning the next entry on the chart each time there was an empty bobbin and plying when all the bobbins were filled. Some of us needed an extra week to spin our little fine singles, but look at the results!

So, the plying pattern goes 3 plies of all one color, then 2 plies of that color with one ply of the next color, then 1 ply of the first color with two plies of the second, then 3 plies of the second, and so on. The "orange" looks more like this up close.

And the "green".



I used the pattern that Colleen included in the workshop material to knit up the yarns, dividing each color into two and starting with solid yellow and working through the color system back to yellow. Then I reversed it. Up close, the stitches show the individual colors...

...but from across the room, they blend into a rainbow.

The end result is fabulous! There is already a line-up to claim the scarf, but I think I'm just going to hang it somewhere and admire it until the snow flies. Let's hope for a long autumn!