Fun with rolags

I've been playing with my blending board, practicing the techniques I learned from Heavenly Bresser in a class a few weeks ago. Want to see?

To recap where we left off before... Here is a color combination known as a "square," where the four main colors are fairly equidistant from each other on the color wheel. I also have a bit of silk (the undyed fiber on the bottom left), and a very colorful bit of recycled sari silk (bottom right):

I filled the blending board and pulled these rolags off (one was a little thin in the middle and became two shorter rolags):

I spun these on my new Electric Eel Wheel (the espinner):

I wound the singles into a center pull ball and plied directly from it, using both ends to make a 2-ply yarn:

I ended up with a little 30 gram skein of yarn. It's so soft and cute! My mom says this yarn looks like a fiesta:

For my next batch, I returned to the idea of a split-complementary. The blues and greens are analogous colors, and the orange is the complementary on the opposite side of the color wheel. The sari silk is just for texture, additional pops of color, and fun:

This is what the rolags looked like after blending:

I made a center-pull ball out of the singles, just like with the last batch:

And here is the resulting skein, just a little one at 16.3 grams. I spun this one on my Ladybug:

Finally, I decided to make a larger skein. I know I can easily fit about 30 grams of fiber on the blending board at one time, so I collected colors and amounts to total double that.  These are the colors (but not the amounts) - I was going for another split complementary with blue-purple as the analogous colors, and gold-yellow as the complementary. I also have some gray to tone things down, and some camel down for texture and color muting:

I weighed each color and split it in half, separating the halves into baskets (the sari silk add-ins aren't worth weighing):

This time, I kept notes on what I added in each layer, so I could roughly duplicate it in the next batch. In the end, I had two trios: 

I spun the singles on the EEW, spinning some plain white fiber between sets so I would know where the dividing point was. I transferred those singles to storage bobbins, and plied from them:

And here is what I got! This skein is 51.5 grams... less than I planned, but that's because I realized that I couldn't incorporate larger amounts of the camel down in the blend as I originally thought. It's still a soft and pretty skein!

The blending possibilities are truly endless. I've signed up for another (online) blending board class later this month, with Sheepspot teacher Sasha Torres. I can tell from her Instagram reels that she uses a very different technique for blending and rolling. It's always helpful to learn from many teachers, and I know I'll learn something new. One thing I need to work on it keeping the rolags light and airy, so they don't strain my hands to spin long draw.