Painted roving is a hot item these days. All spinning shops carry it, vendors at shows carry wide selections, and many on-line suppliers of spinning fibers also have wide selections in every imaginable colorway. The rovings call to us, the soft fibers and beautiful colorways beg us to take them home and spin them up into lovely, beautifully colored yarns. Yet, once spun, the yarn often disappoints. The brilliant colors have become muddied in the spinning process, they yarn is drabber than what we’d hoped for, and we are not nearly as happy with the end result as we thought we would be. There must be some way to spin the fibers in to yarn and still preserve the brilliant colors of the roving, mustn’t there?

There is! And that’s where fractals come in. Bear with me here for a moment, “fractal” is a math term and needs a bit of explanation. Note to mathophobes (I am one myself.): No math is required here - all that is needed is a basic understanding of the term.

According to Wikipedia, a fractal is “"a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole”. It comes from the Latin word “fractus” which means "broken" or "fractured."

How does this apply to spinning painted roving? When the roving opened and laid out full length on a table, it becomes a line, not a straight line but a rough line - a rough geometric shape, and a shape which is easy to split up or break into parts. By splitting the roving into parts, we can control the color sequence of our spinning, which in turn gives us control over the color sequence in our finished yarn.

The first step is to lay the roving out and examine the color sequence. There are three main sequences used for dyeing rovings: Random, Linear, and Palindrome. Random is the one sequence over which the spinner can have little control.

A linear sequence repeats the same colors over from the beginning. Blue, Green, Yellow, Blue, Green Yellow, etc. would be a linear sequence. A palindrome sequence mirror images the color repeat: Blue, Green, Yellow, Yellow, Green, Blue, etc. If your roving has one sequence and you would prefer the other, it can be changed simply by splitting the roving into pieces and rearranging the color sequence. Also, look at the direction of the color. To keep the colors in order, be sure to start from the same end of the color sequence when spinning each bobbin.

The next step is to look at the repeats of color in the roving. Are the colors distributed evenly over the length or do some have smaller lengths and some have larger lengths? Longer color areas will make longer stripes of color, shorter ones will make shorter stripes. Even blocks of color in the roving will give even blocks of color in the yarn.

Here’s where the fractals come in: We’re going to split up the roving before spinning it. First, split the roving in half lengthwise. Spin one bobbin using half of the roving, being sure to maintain the color sequence of the roving as you spin. This will give long runs of each color on the bobbin. Change bobbins and prepare the second half of the roving for spinning by dividing it into several pieces by splitting it lengthwise. How many strips this is split into is up to you - thicker strips will give more areas of “pure” color striping to your yarn, while thinner strips will give thinner stripes of pure color and larger areas of blended colors in the finished yarn. Either way, the stripping pattern will be quite even once the yarn is finished.