affreca: (Craft)
affreca ([personal profile] affreca) wrote2025-05-18 09:18 pm

Two Months In

It's been about two months since I quit my job. I haven't been good a motivation for physical things, but Lawnchair's bike training gets me out of the house, either to meet up with him in a different small town 20-30 miles out or taking the RV trailer out to a lake from which he can bike 60 mile loops and I can hike random 2-6 mile trails. I've been a bit better about going to fiber guild meetings, or Fiber evenings at L's studio. I did also manage to spend three days volunteering to teach middle and high school students how to measure surface water characteristics. And training to volunteer with local river NGO kayak trips, with the first I signed up for on Wednesday. That actually sounds like a lot...

Most of my actual time (that isn't internet surfing) is spinning. I blended and spun up 42 different one ounce yarns to make myself play with new color and fiber combinations. I learned a lot, but by the end of it I was running out of ideas (multiple attempts at blending orange and teal wool and getting unexpected results, including the time I made grey).

During that set of experiments, I took a class from L that inspired a new set of experiments. See, most of the color blending classes I've taken bring out the same color wheel - red blue yellow. L's was cyan magenta yellow, and one of the students asked why. While L couldn't answer, it stuck with me. I know printing inks are CMYB, but I never thought why. I know there's a different set of primary colors if you're adding lights, but.. 20 minutes of googling and I realize that my color theory education has holes.

So I decided to blend up RBY vs. CMY color wheels in wool fiber. I dyed four ounces of each color, and started making .5 ounce batts. I've done the primary, secondary and tertiary colors, and even did some cross wheel batts - blue/cyan, blue/magenta, red/magenta and red/cyan. Next up is some tints, tones and shades. Still deciding if I'm going to spin up the entire batt, or save a sample unspun. Maybe spin most of the batts, but tape a small bit of wool to a flashcard..

Useful, no.. but finding projects.
thistleingrey: (Default)

[personal profile] thistleingrey 2025-05-19 04:34 am (UTC)(link)
The color experiments sound fun!
thistleingrey: (Default)

[personal profile] thistleingrey 2025-05-20 07:56 pm (UTC)(link)
make one of the simpler I Love Hue patterns

That'd be amazing!
mific: (Default)

[personal profile] mific 2025-05-19 04:48 am (UTC)(link)
Ah, yeah, colours opposite on the wheel will make brown when mixed, so orange and blue, but teal would add a touch more green.

Be interested if there's any difference in CMY vs RBY mixes - it might be the difference between translucent light colour and physical object colour, so maybe not?

Was there a reason you left your job?
mific: (Default)

[personal profile] mific 2025-05-21 12:21 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, there are so many reds and blues. It's hard in pigment mixing not to end up with it being a little muddy.

Glad you were able to get out - it seems like a terrible time to be working for the feds.
tbutler: (Default)

[personal profile] tbutler 2025-05-22 06:29 am (UTC)(link)
Ow. I haven't been following DW much lately and missed the original quitting notice. My empathy; I'm still out of work and working on projects to fill up the time. Photography is the big one, though the MG flareup has made that harder. (And yeah, a federal employee has a really hard row to hack these days. x.x)

Good luck on the textiles and color blending!