After picking up the wound sample cards (and visiting my relatives) in Maryland, Mike and I flew to Chicago to visit his family. It was cold in Chicago. -6F, with a wind chill of -22F.

Now, I’ve lived in California for the past 30 years, so I can confidently tell you that there is no such thing as a negative temperature. I have no idea what temperature it actually is when they stick a minus sign in front of the number, but it can’t possibly be real. It’s probably more like the temperature of outer space, which I estimate to be somewhere around 15F (well beyond the point where your avocado and lemon trees die, and also the coldest temperature ever recorded in my hometown). So I spent pretty much the entire time indoors, looking at the thermometer in disbelief. If the gods had intended people to live in places that cold, they would never have created California.

While trapped inside by our sudden transportation into the interstellar void, I decided to try photographing my samples. I already knew that the standard iPhone camera app would be insufficient, so I had gotten the ProCamera app for my iPhone, and used it to adjust the white balance of the image. Then I shot photos of all the samples. Here’s an example photo:

Then I checked it on my laptop monitor, which I had color calibrated using equipment borrowed from a professional photographer friend (Joe Decker, who shoots unbelievably beautiful Arctic landscapes). Alas, the app had not captured the colors correctly.

This started a long chain of progressively more desperate attempts to get color-accurate photos of the samples. Even assistance from a trained professional didn’t help:

Here’s a composite photo showing some of my attempts. Unbelievably, all these photos are of the same two sample cards – just with different apps, color correction, and lighting. (They are all shot with my iPhone 7, but that wasn’t the problem – I tested it against the camera of a semipro photographer friend, and – surprisingly – the iPhone rendered pretty much the same colors as his much more expensive camera.)

As you can see, the colors are similar, but not the same. And when I tell you that none of these is exactly the same color as the real-life sample cards (even under the same lighting), you will begin to understand the depths of my existential despair.

Well, at least I can take some comfort in the knowledge that my inability to capture the colors accurately is largely irrelevant – unless your monitor has been calibrated using professional-grade equipment, the colors you are seeing won’t be accurate anyway. (Monitors are notorious for distorting colors.)

I’m still planning to photograph and post the samples on my website, though. Even with shifted colors there’s a lot of information in the samples that will be helpful to other dyers. I hope to post the samples I have within the next month or two.

After returning from our 10-day holiday trip, I had 36 hours at home before flying out again to San Diego to give a program and a workshop for the San Diego Weavers Guild. Here’s a photo of me giving my talk about brainstorming:

This was one of my last in-person workshops. I’ve decided that it makes more sense for me to focus on developing my online classes, so I’m no longer booking any in-person teaching. I will be giving one talk at Convergence (about critiquing your work) and will be teaching at ANWG 2019, but that’s basically it.

I had planned to stay in San Diego for a few extra days to visit some friends, but felt like I was coming down sick, so I decided to cut my trip short and fly home on Monday. This turned out to be an excellent decision, because I broke a tooth Monday morning at breakfast. Being an overachiever, I didn’t just crack it a little – I split it clean in half, right down to the root. I grabbed the next flight home; Mike picked me up at the airport and ferried me straight to the dentist. Who was quite impressed by the swath of destruction:

Since there was nothing left to save, the next step (two days later) was a hot date with an oral surgeon, which ended like this:

Now I have a titanium peg in my jaw. In another four months or so, after the titanium implant has bonded to the bone, I’ll get a crown on the implant and will finally look normal again.

Meanwhile, for those wondering about the puzzle, I finally started it! I decided to begin with this tray:

And after about 2.5 hours, here’s what I had assembled:

It’s proving quite difficult – partly because the pieces are so featureless, but also because the pieces are designed to be ambiguous about fit – so it’s not just finding the right color pieces, but also about making sure they actually fit. Usually I don’t find out about misplaced pieces until considerably later in the puzzle. It’s frustrating, because I prefer puzzles in which a piece that appears to fit actually does.

And so far, I think I’ve foiled the puzzle gods by covering up the puzzle when not in use. But of course it is a bad idea to underestimate the mighty powers and fiendish cleverness of the puzzle gods, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m still not quite caught up to my present-day adventures, but this is getting long again, so I’ll end here. But I’ll leave you with one of the marvelous photos captured by our cat-sitter while we were away. Somehow she manages to get better photos of Tigress and Fritz in ten days than I do all year – and she sends us twenty or thirty photos every day we’re away, so we get to see our “kids” having fun with her. (It helps with the shakes – “cold turkey” cat withdrawal can be seriously dangerous.)

Anyway, here is the best one of the lot. I’m going to save it to blackmail Tigress with after she becomes rich and famous.

I’m considering changing my dye methodology for my 1500+ samples. I timed some steps, did some calculations, and discovered that the rearranging and relabeling of skeins between dyebaths takes a lot more time than expected. The total amount of time required for each skein comes out to almost 10 minutes a skein! That is, at least in theory, pretty close to the amount of time required for individual dyebaths. And individual dyebaths would be of more practical use since I wouldn’t have to do three dyebaths to replicate the color in the sample.

So I have been working on developing and refining my methodology for individual samples. It’s been…complicated. Here’s my basic setup:

The dyebath needs to be kept at about 90F, which is difficult to do when working with small jars for individual dyebaths. So I am putting glass pint canning jars into a pair of circulating water baths. (The right-hand water bath has no jars in this photo – I was still setting up.)

A bucket below the jars contains a pump and a bucket heater (to maintain the temperature).

The pump (meant for a small fountain) pushes the water up the tube on the left, into the first water bath:

Water is coming up from the bucket through the left-hand tube. A clear tube on the right side siphons water out of the bath and into the next circulating water bath. Because the pump and siphon are on opposite sides of the container, water moves through the entire container, keeping the temperature even. A temperature probe (the cord taped to the back right corner of the water bath) controls the heater in the bucket and keeps the temperature of the bath at 90F.

The second circulating water bath is a bit simpler. It’s located a few inches below the first water bath, so gravity pulls water through the siphon in the first water bath down into the second bath. A second siphon at the opposite end of the container pulls the water down and into the bucket, to be pumped up again. (Here the inlet hose is in top right, and the siphon to the bucket is in the bottom left corner.

It’s an elegant solution, but also quite fussy. The siphons have to remove water from each circulating bath at the same rate that the pump is pumping it in, which is a bit tricky. I accidentally flooded my first set of skeins when I made a small adjustment, walked away to check my email for a few minutes, and came back to find the water bath overflowing! Lesson learned: if you’re doing something for the first time, for heaven’s sake don’t walk away from it and assume it will work!

I found initially that the jars, when empty, tended to float. So I stuck rocks into them to weigh them down. (No, those are not potatoes in the bottom!) It worked, but I have some better ideas for next time.

Here’s what it looks like with 50 individual dyebaths going:

Each dyebath has a different concentration of Gold, Mixing Red, and Navy Blue.

Because of the difficulty of measuring small amounts of dye and other dyebath additives, I made up stock solutions of dye, salt, and soda ash, and measured out the amounts with syringes (tested for accuracy). Here is Kaye (my dyeing buddy) adding soda ash solution to one of the dyebaths. She’s holding the skein up above the dyebath as she adds the soda ash solution with the syringe.

As you can see, this method is much fussier and more error-prone than the sequential-dyebath method. However, it will enable me to reproduce the results with a single dyebath. And, if I decide to sell color plates of my samples, they will be much more useful to buyers if they don’t have to do three dyebaths to achieve the same results. So I am continuing to experiment and refine the process, to see if I can make individual dyebaths work. So far I’ve botched three sets of skeins, but I’m learning something with every dyebath, and I’m confident I can figure it out, though it may take me a few more weeks. When you’re doing something new, you’ll inevitably run into snags – this is just giving me more snags than most.

Meanwhile, Mike has very kindly put together a skein-drying and storage rack in the dining room, turning an untidy pile of skeins into a beautiful curtain of color.

Thankfully, this is what the cats think of it:

And that’s it for now! I’m hoping to have pretty pictures of a successful batch soon. Stay tuned!

I’ve now completed the second “cube” of Procion MX fiber-reactive dye samples on cotton: dark shades of sun yellow, fuchsia, and turquoise. The dye concentrations I’m using are 0, 0.5, 1, 2, and 4%. The results are of course pretty:

Why am I doing two independent dye cubes rather than one that covers the entire gamut? Because dye cubes over a certain size are inefficient. They produce a lot of samples too similar to be distinguished. Since each skein costs $0.40, wasted skeins are wasted money.

(Warning: technical discussion ahead.)

You can see this in the sample book that a friend created in Carol Soderlund’s class (where I got the idea for this particular methodology). Here’s an (annotated) page from my friend’s sample book, showing my overlapping-cube strategy:

Carol Soderlund uses seven concentrations going up to 3% for her classes. That requires 7^3 or 343 samples. But as you can see, the samples in some sections, as indicated by the turquoise arrows, are very similar. That’s because if you add a very small dye concentration to a very large concentration, you’re likely to see only very small changes. So 0.06% sun yellow + 4% fuchsia is unlikely to look very different from 0.12% sun yellow + 4% fuchsia – the higher concentration of fuchsia overpowers the pale yellows. Based on what I learned looking through my friend’s sample book, once one concentration “outweighs” another by more than 16x, the change in color is pretty close to negligible. So if you look at the sample page, you can see that you can get more-or-less the full set of colors by doing two smaller cubes – the one outlined in green, and the one outlined in magenta. You do have to include the two samples in bottom left and the two samples at top right (the ones circled in magenta) to get a full set of colors, so the second “cube” actually has four concentrations, since you have to include 0 as one of the concentrations to get the primaries.

This doesn’t look like a substantial savings, but it is. At the seven concentrations that Soderlund uses, the double-cube method requires only 5^3 + 4^3 =125+64 = 189 skeins, vs. 343 for the full cube. That almost halves the number of samples, without changing the overall palette much. A much more efficient way of developing a palette. That doesn’t matter much when you’re using small squares of fabric, but with the skeins, which are much more expensive both in $ and time, efficiency becomes important.

So I’m doing a double-cube in eight concentrations: (0, 0.06, 0.12, 0.25, 0.50, 1, 2, 4) with two concentrations overlapping between the cubes:

(0, 0.06, 0.12, 0.25, 0.5)

(0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4)

The choice of concentrations for each cube is based on analysis of my friend’s sample book, looking for the biggest assortment of colors in the smallest number of samples.

So…all that said…here is what the two dye cubes look like when placed together, at the two overlapping concentrations:

Here is the annotated version showing the various concentrations:

Here’s what things look like on the layer of the cube with 0.5% turquoise:

While some colors are missing from the palette, you can see – looking across the rows from left to right – that there is not much difference between 4% fuchsia/0% sun yellow and 4% fuchsia/0.5% sun yellow. So the samples in between don’t really add much to the palette, and can be safely removed. 

The “missing colors” at bottom right are a little more complex to evaluate, since the difference between the bottom row and the 0.50% row are substantial, but because sun yellow is a really weak mixing color (there’s not a huge difference between 1% and 4%), I’m guessing I didn’t lose a great deal by eliminating those colors as well. If at the end I feel that the palette is incomplete, I can always go back and “fill in” the missing colors. But I’m happy with the results so far.

This double-cube method with eight concentrations requires 250 samples (two 125-sample cubes) for each triplet of primary colors. Since my “budget” is 1600 skeins, that means I’m limited to 6 combinations of primary colors (1500 skeins). So far I’ve completed one, so five more to go! Next up will be a set of warm primaries: golden yellow, “mixing red,” and cerulean blue. I’ll start those as soon as it stops raining, hopefully later this week.

(If you’re just now coming into this series of dye posts, these samples are being made with Procion MX fiber-reactive dyes on 20/2 mercerized cotton yarn. You can read about the methods/protocol used for dyeing the skeins here.)