In mid-June, the Saturday Spinners hosted a two-day workshop with Gwen Powell. Gwen has earned a
certificate of excellence in handspinning from the HGA (there are only twelve people who have reached this level), and she's become well known for having worked with
Clemes & Clemes to develop their very popular blending board.
On Saturday, we had a class on using the blending board and spinning woolens from the rollags. Gwen showed so many techniques I couldn't keep up! I still have a pile of rollags to spin up one of these days. But I think I have made better friends with my board and now I know what to do with all those little orts of yarns and threads I've been stashing away.
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| Rollag |
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| Spun singles |
I think the first thing we did was some simple striping -- just laying out rows of different colors in varying widths on the board.
Gwen gave some instruction on woolen spinning -- something I've avoided. I did very poorly at first. I'd like to say I was getting the hang of it by the end of the day, but all I can say is that I was doing less poorly. A few thousand hours of practice and I might get a handle on it.
Another technique we tried was color blocking - overlapping colors
slightly, while keeping the fibers all going in the same direction. I
got a little carried away.
We also played with loading the board in different directions. I started to do just a little cross-hatching but it got away from me and I ended up with a bizarre plaid. But I like the way the rollags turned out. Wonder how they'll spin up?
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| Laying down cross-hatched pieces |
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| Added thin layer of dark brown over all to give stability |
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| The 'plaid' rollags |
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| Garneted singles |
Then we tried some garneting. I remember garneting boards from my first incarnation as a wannabe spinner. They were terribly expensive and I wasn't skilled enough (ok, at all) to really consider getting one. In garneting, you basically tangle little bits of interesting stuff into your base. If all goes well, most of the stuff stays in when you spin it. I chopped up small pieces of a filmy purple chiffon and an opaque gold fabric into tiny pieces, along with some little bits of chopped up gold thread, and cross-hatched those bits here and there on the board that was already loaded with my base material. Seemed simple, but it was challenging to get the little bits to stick without pulling up the base. This technique is going to take a lot more practice but I really liked the results. Most of the bits actually stayed in the yarn when I spun my singles, and I lost just a few when I plyed them.
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| Just part of the unspun rollags from class |
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| Saturday's class |
Check out
Gwen's videos about the blending board on YouTube.
