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.
What fun — I love making sample sets like this.