Mulling colors

It’s been a busy and productive couple of days.  I’ve completed about half of the Munsell Student Color Kit, which involves rearranging color chips by hue (color, as in red, orange, yellow, etc.), chroma (“pureness” of color – how much gray is mixed in), and value (dark/light).  Some of the distinctions are fairly subtle, but I’ve had very little trouble with them, possibly because my eye is pretty well-trained already.

Here’s an example (with some yarn samples up against them to show the color matches):

Later in the week we’ll be working on optimizing and standardizing our dye procedures.

I’ve also been working on weft colors.  I didn’t like the original “red” I was using – not intense enough and too orange – so I dyed up three others yesterday.  Here they are, with the three reds crossing the gold warp on the left, the various second weft colors on right, and the warp on the top:

The colors aren’t quite right – the center red is more like brick red, the left-hand red a bit duller, but you get the idea.

I don’t much like any of the three reds – or rather, I think all three could work very nicely with the gold warp but am not sure how it will look in the context of the second warp/weft.  So I am cooking up four more red sample skeins to see if I like any of those better.  I’m hoping they will all be brighter reds – I took them out of Deb Menz’s Color in Spinning dye formulas, with some alterations and adaptations on my part.

Finally, B. was kind enough to rewire my compudobby fans yesterday, so I can get started threading again.  The new fans are much more powerful, but they are also louder, so noise-canceling headphones are definitely in order.

But first, I need to re-boil the syrup for my candied cherries, and turn another 10 lbs of apricots into jam!  Yep, it’s definitely going to be a busy couple of days.