Painting with Yarn and Roving: an art prompt.

Do you exclusively use one medium to paint with?  I do.  Or at least I thought I did.  Todays's art prompt is to paint using a medium you don't usually use. So I guess that would mean oils or watercolors.  Which I don't even own. Nor can I afford another trip to OPUS, where I overspend... often.  What I do own though are huge stash baskets of beautiful hand painted yarns and roving. And yes, I overspend at the yarn store too... often. 

I'm still slaving away on my Seaweed Maiden and I recently turned to some hand painted roving. It is called "hand painted" because fibre artists take the bare wool roving and carefully paint dyes onto the fibres, or hand dip the roving into dye baths. The roving I bought was meant to be spun into yarn, but I had other plans for it.

I teased my hank apart so that I could pick and choose the colors I wanted to blend and "paint" with.

Knitters know the joy of knitting with hand painted yarns. Colors shift and blend right before your very eyes. Hand dyers create these amazing yarns by either spinning the hand dyed roving or by kettle dying hanks of spun yarn.  Here is Ryan from Knotty by Nature spinning some of his beautiful hand dyed roving into an artful yarn.

Ahhh! So gorgeous.  This makes me want to go shopping right now.

The other technique is to dip dye bare yarns in kettles of hot dye. This image from Lorna's Laces shows just how colorful and painterly this process can be.

This is definately something I want to try for myself one day!