Year of Colour: Colour Wheel

Dear Spinning Circle,

As many of you know, Rebecca and I have been working through the Year of Colour in our own ways, both on the podcast, The Wool Circle and Spinning Purls. Throughout the past couple of months, the Along has kind of gained its own amazing momentuum and left me completely amazed at what’s coming out of the community left and right. I have already learned so much and my mind is constantly being blown – in the best way possible. I feel inspired, excited and fired up to continue on this path with you all.

In an effort to share more of the behind-the-scenes stuff that happens when we embark on these huge spin-alongs (SALs) together, I thought I would share with you some of my sampling as I make them. I love seeing what people are working on and how that informs their larger body of work, so this is a great opportunity to share as I go with you guys!

First, I started with the colour wheels, which Rebecca will be further discussing on an upcoming episode of The Wool Circle (more information here, if you are first learning about that Live Stream within the community). Rebecca has been sharing about colour blending on handcards, and that is where I started as well! Using dyed Corriedale (mostly because I love Corriedale), I started with a warm set of colours, including: Scarlet (the Crimson was the cool red, which I regrettably didn’t purchase), Royal (cool blue, the warm blue was called Sapphire) and Buttercup (a cool yellow, the warm was called Mustard):

From there, for a more modern look and feel, I started to also play with the CMYK colour wheel, which is a printers’ colour wheel or digital colour wheel. The K in this colour wheel stands for Key or black. Because dots of colour are printed on a white piece of paper, the more ink, the darker the colours become. This colour wheel is subtractive becuase each colour subtracts or absorbs some of the wavelengths of light. This makes sense because the more ink there is on the paper, the less light is reflected back to us, the viewer. Many dyers like to use CMYK because it feels more modern and there are many nuances to this colour wheel that allows the dyer to play with. Neither is better or worse, they are just different. And it’s really fun to play with both!

From this place of starting, I decided to continue playing and create some desaturated samples – more on that in another post! See you then!

Where did you start with your Year of Colour? What are you enjoying the most to date? Is there something you’ve learned that really surprised you? Share below!