I woke up early this morning, ran out to  the dyepots, and rinsed out my samples!

From left to right, they are varying grades of violet to turquoise @ 4% DOS, and then the first few stages of violet-to-magenta, also at 4%.

Because the dyebath did not exhaust completely, I decided that I must have used too much dye, so for the next batch I reduced the dye to 2%.  It came out considerably lighter, but the dyebath still did not exhaust.

Puzzled, I revisited my calculations, and realized I’d put in roughly THIRTY times as much leveling agent as I should have!  I had been putting in 8 ml where I should have put in .4 ml.  That’s what comes of being a math major!

(At Caltech we had a rule that said the youngest non-math major had to calculate the bill whenever we went to a restaurant.  The youngest got stuck with the chore, but it was generally agreed that (theoretical) math majors were so hopelessly incompetent at arithmetic that they should be exempted.  And I was a math major!  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.  😉 )

And here is a photo of my dye sampling setup:

It’s basically an electric frying pan with a bunch of canning jars in it.  Watch this space, though, because I’m going to upgrade it!  I got so frustrated with the canning jars (which are way too big for my 40 ml dye samples) that I ordered an entire case of 60ml Pyrex glass vials from eBay.  They are way smaller than the pint jars (a pint jar is 450 ml!) so I should be able to do larger sample batches using the smaller vials.  Assuming the whole idea works.  I guess I’ll just have to try it!

I know there are people out there who find dyeing samples (or weaving them!) to be incredibly tedious, but I find it absolutely fascinating.  You can find out so much  in such a short time!   And it’s magical to see the results coming in after just an hour or two.  After spending an entire year on the dress, I think I’m entitled to some instant gratification!

The dye skeins arrived today and I was so excited that I played hooky from my guild meeting and dove straight in!  I made up my stock solutions, did my calculations, and was off and dyeing.

I put considerable thought yesterday into what to dye first, and what sequence to dye in.  What I’ve decided to do is to dye samples for blends of any TWO primaries, but not to try dyeing three-primary triangles just now.  That will vastly reduce the number of skeins required.

My reasoning behind this is pretty simple: I like working with bright colors, primaries and secondaries mostly.  Someday I’ll get around to playing with more somber colors, but for now I like the bright shades I’ve been using.  The color wheel I want to dye consists entirely of high-chroma colors.  So why not dye only the bright-color sections of the color spectrum?

So I went through my collection of dyes and listed out all the colors I want to mix.  I then decided to dye some of them in 6-skein sample sets and others in 11-skein sample sets.  (Colors which are close to each other got 6-skein sets, colors that were substantially different got a full 11-skein set.)  This resulted in the this nifty little Excel chart:

As you can see in the diagram, there are still a LOT of skeins involved, but it’s a lot more manageable n0w.  I think I will also skip color combinations that I know will come out subdued in hue (like scarlet and turquoise, which produce brown), and focus on just the brighter colors for now.

So anyway, I made my little chart, then made up a spreadsheet calculating dye formulas for each set of colors.  I decided to dye at 4% weight of goods (4 grams dye for every 100g of yarn), and set up my collection of sampling jars in the electric frying-pan I use for dyeing samples.  I started with Sabraset (acid) dyes – violet, turquoise, and magenta.  I did up the entire violet-turquoise range and half the violet-magenta range.  The skeins are cooling in their dyebath now, and I’ll take them out and rinse them tomorrow morning.

One thing I noticed was that the dyes did not exhaust.  That might be the result of using Albegal SET (a leveling agent), but I might also have used too much dye.  For my next set of samples, I think I’m going to back the dye amounts off to 2% weight-of-goods and see if that  produces better results.

Photos tomorrow, once I have the skeins out of the jars!  I can hardly wait.

Over the last two days, I’ve been cleaning up my studio, and also contemplating dye samples.  400 mini-skeins (not warps, just skeins) are landing on my doorstep this afternoon, and I’m thinking about what to do with them.  It takes 66 skeins to make a single sample set (see my dyeing page for details), so while it sounds like a great deal, it’s only  enough to make 6 sample sets (assuming no botches and assuming I don’t use them for sampling anything else).  So I have to choose carefully what I want to sample.

First of all, I’ve been using two different kinds of dye, and both will dye silk.  I use an acid dye (Lanaset/Sabraset), and a fiber-reactive dye (Sabracron F).  Acid dyes are meant to be used on protein fibers; fiber-reactive dye is meant to be used on cellulose.  Both will work on silk, so I could dye my samples with either.  So far I like the Sabracron F colors better, but the fiber-reactive dyeing method is not supposed to be good for silk, so I’m interested in exploring acid dyes as well.

(To make matters even more complicated, Sabracron F, like most fiber-reactive dyes, can be used as acid dyes as well.  More possibilities!)

Anyway, each type of dye comes with roughly six primaries: cool yellow, warm yellow, cool red, warm red, cool blue, warm blue.  There are also some secondary colors which you can’t mix, like Sabraset Violet, and which are quite pretty.  But there are 8 possible combinations of just the six primaries, in a single dye type.

There is also dye intensity, expressed as a % of dye relative to the (dry) weight of whatever you’re dyeing.  0.25% DOS (depth of shade) gives a pale result; 2% usually produces a pretty intense color.  Shades can shift at lower intensities; just because you got a specific brown at 2% does not mean you will get the same-but-lighter brown at 0.25%!

So now there are 8 possible combinations of primaries, and roughly 8 possibilities for shading (the human eye can only distinguish seven or eight steps between white and black).  That’s 64 sets of samples for each set of primaries (and we’re not even including the “interesting” secondaries!).  Multiply by two kinds of dye and you get 128 sample sets that you could dye for a full palette.

Makes 6 sets (400 skeins) look totally inadequate, doesn’t it?

So I have to choose carefully, and I’m still mulling over what to do.

Meanwhile, while mulling over dyes, I’ve been busy with more mundane tasks, like cleaning up my studio.  One full morning of cleaning later, it is still quite messy, but at least there’s room to move about!  So I think I may declare “victory” and start work on other projects.