More dye samples

Ginny, bless her heart,  emailed me on Friday letting me know she had nearly finished winding my dye samples  onto bobbins.  So I went and picked them up today.  Beautiful colors – I’ve been working with the blue-purple-magenta range and really like the color blends I’ve been getting.  Here’s a photo:

For this round of dye samples, I’m only mixing two colors, in varying proportions, systematically working my way from one color to another in units of 10%.  So I start with 100% color 1, then 90% color 1 and 10% color 2, then 80-20 color 1 color 2, and so on until I reach 100% color 2.  Eleven samples in all.  I’m basically doing all combinations of “pure” Sabraset colors, which will be a total of some 300-ish skeins if I recall correctly.  (For some close-to-each-other colors, I’m only doing 6 combinations, jumping by 20% each time.)

After I’m done dyeing, I (or more accurately Ginny) wind a few yards onto a cardboard or plastic bobbin:

This tells me at a glance exactly how to reproduce the color.

Then I file all these samples away in a dye notebook.  When I want to select a color, I can just go and flip through my dye notebooks until I find a close match, then figure out how to modify it to get the shade I want.  Or, if I’m selecting a palette, I can flip through until I find some shades I like, pull out the bobbins, and lay them next to each other for comparison.  Because the bobbins are labeled, I have no trouble figuring out how to put them back afterward.

For a detailed description of how I make my samples, see my dyeing page.