I think I’ve decided which colors to dye for the first taquete exercise:
I’m not 100% certain yet, especially about the cinnamon brown and the fuchsia. I don’t like the fuchsia much but it’s a great mixing color: I can get a beautiful deep purple with the blue and orange and reds with the gold (at least, if my theory of optical mixing is correct). I love love love the cinnamon brown, but it requires mixing up three extra colors of stock solution! so I’m not sure whether it’s worth the bother.
Anyway, it looks like I’ll need to mix up seven stock solutions to dye all those colors: gold, intense blue, yellow, scarlet, regular blue, fuchsia, and red. That’s a lot of dyestock. I wish my skeinwinder weren’t on the fritz right now – fiber-reactive dyes (which is what I’m using for this silk/tencel mix) have only a week or two of shelf life once mixed with water, so I’d like to dye lots of skeins at once to avoid wasting dye. But I only got six skeins wound before it started misbehaving, so that’s all I have available. (The new motor for the skeinwinder got shipped out earlier this week – it was still under warranty – and should arrive later in the week, so I do get a second chance.)
Anyhow, I have made a good start on the dyeing this morning, so it is looking like it might actually be possible to get the dyeing done today. Who knows? I’ll do my best, which is all that can be asked for, really.
I use Sabracron F fiber reactive dyes, and I keep them for months in the fridge in stock solution. It’s possible that the color degrades a bit, but I’m not trying for repeatable colors. In general, I these dyes are more stable than the MX fiber reactive dyes.