I finished the next set of attempts for the color wheel. Here are the photos and my notes (note that the photo is very untrue to color, for reasons noted below – it’s more to give a general idea of what’s going on than an actual sense for the matches):
I am still finding it difficult to assess near-matches because of the glossiness of the silk and the way the hue-value-chroma changes (often radically) depending on the angle of the light. I am trying to do the matching at approximately the same time of day (7:30am or so) in the same place, viewing a flat horizontal surface from above. But it is still difficult. I look at the photo above – green does not look like a match at all because the light is coming from a slightly oblique angle, but viewed from straight above it matches perfectly. And so on.
I also decided to remove the color chips and place them on the card. The edge of the card has shadows that make assessing the match more difficult.
Here are my notes from the comparison (click to get the larger image so you can actually read it!)
The last assignment is to pick a color, any color, and try to reproduce it. I will pick a (relatively) neutral color since that is more challenging, and I want to do the hard stuff within the context of the study group while I can still get the thoughts of Karren and the other study group members. (And, you learn more by diving into the hard stuff first!)
Regarding my taquete puzzle, I did what I should have done at the beginning and called Sharon, my sewing mentor, to ask her about lining a shawl. It turns out it’s quite do-able – all you have to do is do an invisible, loosely-sewn tack about once every 10-12″ within the shawl, to keep the layers together. So it’s full steam ahead! I have purchased several thousand yards of rayon embroidery thread to do the weaving, and it won’t be here for several days, so I’m going to use the interim time to (a) further refine the peacock feather pattern, and (b) maybe weave up some butterflies. For some reason, I really like the idea of weaving butterflies!
Beautiful!
The reflection of color off the silk and paper will always be a problem. Try putting the sample on a copier/scanner on b/w and see what information the resulting print gives you. Not sure if it will work with a digital camera or not.
Teresa
Tien, your figures really confuse me. When I work with percentages I use 100% to represent the total. I assume you are using 3% because that is the DOS you are working with? DOS is really irrelevant to percentages of dye. I get the percentage based on the 100% and then when I work with grams I multiply the result by the DOS I want. This way I don’t have to reconvert the recipe for each DOS; only multiply by the DOS number. Or perhaps I am missing something? Sure hope the second group makes it!
Hi Peg,
Karren taught us that there are actually two ways of recording dye percentages. Industry simply lists the depth of shade for each dye in the mix: 2.5% Sun Yellow/0.5% Turquoise means 2.5% weight of goods Sun Yellow, 0.5% weight of goods Turquoise.
This can easily be converted to the home dyer’s percentage-based method: 2.5% Sun Yellow/0.5% Turquoise is the same as 3.0% DOS 84% Sun Yellow and 16% Turquoise.
I decided to switch over to the industry method as it’s more intuitive for me, and easier to handle the calculations: if I want to nudge black up a trifle I add 0.1 or 0.01% to the Black DOS rather than upping the percentage of black and then recalculating all the amounts. It also “feels” easier to me because I can mentally superimpose my 2% DOS sample of Scarlet on my .5% DOS sample of Mustard, and quickly label the mix 2% Scarlet/0.5% Mustard without having to laboriously calculate percentages.
I like the idea of butterflies weaving! So much more sensible idea than flying all the way to Mexico.
As I think about it it would be the caterpillars that weave since they have all the thread. And that is sort of done with the silk worms ; they are put into tiny flat spaces when it it is time to spin their cocoons and you can get a kind of silk paper from the very flat cocoons.