I started designing and making Fractal Rovings out of frustration with many handdyed rovings that simply would not spin "as advertised". I often had beginning spinners come to me with beautiful rovings they had purchased wondering why the yarn looked nothing like the roving. I wanted something a lot more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I started looking closely at both rovings and the resulting yarns and really thinking about how dye colour choice, arrangement, and the staple length of the fibre affected the finished yarn. Self Striping yarns were just beginning to appear and I wanted to spin something like them.

My experiments resulted in Fractal Rovings - rovings that spin into predictable stripes that look like the colours in the original roving. I loved them, and I loved playing with colourways. Trouble was, I can dye a whole lot faster than I can spin and much, much faster than I can knit up what I've spun. The FibreSpace was getting overrun. So I started to sell my creations, first to fellow guild members and then on to Etsy.

My approach to colour is on the technical side. I am not an artist, I'm an artisan meaing I have good technical skills in spinning and dyeing, but less talent for colour. So I started by working with analogous colour schemes - using only 2 primaries at a time prevents mud. I had an old book of dye samples and formulas that gave me a starting point. From there I built a base set of formulas that I could change by varying depth of shade and by changing the primary colours I used. Then I got a little braver and tried some tertiary colours - colours made with 3 primaries - and the Grey's Analogy colourways were born. I fine tuned the base formula sets for Analogies and Grey's Analogies with 3 value ranges for each (Pale, Mid and Dark).

In 2013 I taught an introduction to acid dyes workshop at my guild (www.ovwsg.com). You can read about what we did on my blog (http://hilltopfibre.blogspot.ca/2013_03_01_archive.html) but basically we ended up with sample books showing over 120 combinations of 2 or 3 of my primary dye colours. It's amazing how large a difference changing a primary colour makes (for examples see Ocean and Calypso or Periwinkle and Blueberry; they are made with the same formulas, just different blues). The sample book means that I now have a reference that allows me to create a vast variety of colourways simply by choosing a set of primary colours to plug into my base formulas. It will take me a VERY long time to exhaust the possibilities...

I have a day job, help my DH run a small business and we have 2 teenage children. Fibre pursuits often take a back seat until summer. As a school Speech/Language Pathologist I have summers off and that's when I am able to really produce. I participated in Twist Festival in 2013 and will do so again in 2014 so I am motivated to produce lots of colourways and product which will eventually make it Etsy. My friend Judy (www.jumaka.com) is a brilliant professionally trained photographer (and spinner, dyer, woodturner and more - go visit her when you are done here :-)) who finally helped me deal with getting some decent photos which is my usual stumbling block in posting to Etsy (and Ravelry, and the blog...).