procion mx dye samples | Tien Chiu's Blog

June 11, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Pictures of 1000 dye samples are now online!

A quick note to let y’all know: I’ve posted 1000 of my 1500 dye samples on my website, along with an extensive write-up about my dye process. The other 500 samples are still being photographed, but they should be up later this week.

Here’s the link to the master page:

Dye Sample Project

Please spread the word! It was a LOT of work photographing everything, color-correcting the images, and writing/posting the documentation for the samples. I did it because I thought others might find them useful – so please let others know they’re there!

January 25, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Adventures in color

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:

Procion MX dye sample sheet - cube method — Procion MX dye sample sheet – Gold, Mixing Red, Navy

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:

Tien talking at the San Diego Weavers Guild

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:

puzzle progress - 2.5 hours — puzzle progress – 2.5 hours

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.

January 16, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Dye adventures

The last few weeks have been jam-packed, so I’m going to tell the story over a few blog posts. This one is about my Anything-Worth-Doing-Is-Worth-Overdoing Procion MX dye sample project.

The adventure started with a trip to spend Christmas with my family. The first challenge was packing for the trip. In addition to five fruitcakes, Christmas gifts, and clothes, I needed to pack 500 ten-gram skeins of cotton dye samples from the massive sample-dyeing project I did over the summer. My friend Carla and I had agreed to split the work: I would dye all 1500 skeins, and she would wind two sets of dye sample cards, one for me and one for her. She had wound 1,000 skeins onto cards already; I was bringing her the last 500 skeins. Which, of course, meant figuring out how to pack it.

For the uninitiated, 500 ten-gram skeins is a LOT of yarn. If you’re wondering how much, here’s a picture showing one set of samples – 250 skeins.

500 skeins, of course, is double that volume. We’re talking a giant suitcase full of yarn!

Which led to the first challenge – how do you bring an entire suitcase worth of yarn, plus clothes, etc. for your trip, when you only have one suitcase?

I thought I had solved that problem – buy an inexpensive duffel bag, stuff the clothes and non-breakable stuff into the duffel bag, and put the yarn in the suitcase. (Because if the airline destroyed the duffel bag, going around naked in the dead of winter would be way better than losing my dye samples. (Priorities!)) Then, once the skeins were delivered, I could fold the duffel bag and stick it into the suitcase.

All went well until I started packing. The first problem was predictable (and adorable!):

Both cats find luggage irresistible, of course. After all, what is luggage but a giant box? And what are boxes for, but to sit in?

Fortunately, I solved this problem long ago. I pulled out a couple other suitcases, opened them and set them on the bed, and started putting clothes into one of the other suitcases. Sensing an opportunity to get in the way, the cats immediately ran over and sat in the decoy suitcase. And I got the duffel bag. (Hey, when you’re just a lowly cat-slave human, you gotta be tricky!)

After I started packing, however, I realized there was a problem. I had an entire suitcase worth of yarn. I also had a half-suitcase of fruitcakes and Christmas gifts too fragile to put into a duffel bag. Basic physics says that you cannot fit 1.5 suitcases’ worth of stuff into 1 suitcase, even if you are a stupendous packer.

Anyone else would have figured this out days ago. But I got Cs in physics in college – it was my single worst subject. (Although, physics at Caltech is not exactly easy.) And I majored in math. There’s a reason Techers don’t let math majors figure out the bill at restaurants: we’re notoriously incompetent at basic arithmetic. So there was no obvious reason that I would have noticed that 1.5 is bigger than 1. Except, of course, that even a nitwit would have noticed this and bought another suitcase.

But I hadn’t. So there I was – the afternoon before leaving, short one suitcase. And we were going to the airport before dawn, so no opportunity to get a suitcase tomorrow, either.

Amazon PrimeNow to the rescue! It took over an hour (probably because it was December 23), but they delivered a giant suitcase that would be perfect for the job. I gleefully threw my yarn into the new suitcase, and we flew off to Maryland.

In between family celebrations and various get-togethers with friends, I got together with Carla, and together we surveyed our skeins. Here’s a photo showing most of our work:

Procion MX dye sample project - skeins and cards — Procion MX dye sample project – skeins and cards

It’s hard to convey the amount of yarn involved, but it filled up most of the room – I had to get creative to capture everything in a single shot. There are 1,250 hand-dyed skeins and 750 hand-wound sample cards – a total of 27.5 pounds of yarn. (250 skeins were completed and shipped to me in California already, so this is only 5/6 of the project.)

The skeins I brought are at the top of this shot:

And here are the boxes full of leftover skeins. (Each skein started at 10 grams, but after winding the cards and a few mini-skeins, there were still 7 grams left over.)

Procion MX dye cube experiment - skein leftovers — Procion MX dye cube experiment – skein leftovers

Finally, here is the stack of neatly-wound cards:

sample books for Procion MX dye sample project

Each book contains 125 samples, representing all possible combinations of three different dyes (a red, a blue, and a yellow) at 5 different concentrations.

Here’s a closeup of a single page:

Each card has a label on it with the names and concentrations of the three dyes that were used to produce the card. Here’s a closeup of a single card:

sample card for Procion MX dye sample project

Each label starts with the Color Index (CI) name for the dye. This is the “species name” of the dye – its unique identifier within the industry. The CI name never changes, whereas the “common name” of the dye can vary between suppliers. (For example, the Blue MX-2G on this card is called “Cobalt Blue” by Dharma Trading Company and “Mixing Blue” by Pro Chemical and Dye.)

Since no dye supplier actually uses the CI name, the second name is more descriptive. Since I bought my dyes from Pro Chemical and Dye, I decided to use their names for the dye colors, abbreviating them to fit onto the card. The full names of the dyes are Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, and Mixing Blue.

The last part of each line is the amount of each dye used. In this sample, 0.12% of Sun Yellow has been mixed with 0.25% Mixing Blue. There is no Mixing Red in this sample.

I’m in the process of documenting the project. I’ve been photographing each set of samples, trying to get the color as accurate as possible. For tediously technical reasons, taking photos that are true to color is really difficult. I’ve spent at least 10-12 hours fiddling with color checkers, gray cards, lighting, different cameras, and different kinds of post-processing. Each test shot was evaluated against the real-life sample cards on a monitor color-calibrated using a equipment borrowed from a professional photographer.

So far I’ve photographed 500 samples, with 500 left to go. Once I’ve gotten all the samples photographed, cropped, and color-corrected, I plan to put them up on my website, along with documentation about the dyeing methodology and process. Of course, the samples won’t be totally accurate to color – partly due to the limitations of my equipment, but mostly because monitors are notorious for shifting colors, so unless your monitor has been calibrated using photographic calibration equipment, what you see will be different from what I see. But it will hopefully give people some idea of how colors mix in dyeing. And, of course, if you put the time and money into calibrating your monitor, you’ll have something fairly accurate.

It’s getting late here and this post is getting too long, so I’ll end here, and take up the next part of my recent adventures in my next blog post. But I’ll leave you with a hint about a later part of my trip…with cats, of course! (Because, as Fritz and Tigress know, everything is better with cats!)

August 23, 2017 by Tien Chiu

End of a (dyeing) era

Yes, the 1500-skein Procion MX dyeing project is FINALLY at an end! Here are the last 250 skeins hanging up to dry:

Sun Yellow, Fuchsia, Navy Blue dyed skeins hanging up to dry

It took a bit over eight months start to finish, but all the dyeing is finally done. (Many thanks to my friend Kaye, who has been helping out!)

The project, however, is not quite done. My friend Carla is still winding the skeins onto cards – two sets of cards, one for me and one for her, plus two sets of mini-skeins for the other people who offered to split costs. She is making amazingly fast progress – she’ll be finishing up the 1000th skein sometime in the next few days. After that we’ll go on hiatus until I fly out to Maryland to visit family, and can bring the two final sets of skeins for her to work on. (On my last trip, I brought 750 skeins – which meant two large suitcases full of yarn! My family was wondering why I needed two suitcases and a carryon for a three-day trip…)

This reminds me of a poem by the second-greatest sage of the 20th century, aka Shel Silverstein:

Shel Silverstein was one of my best-loved writers as a kid…this poem is from Where the Sidewalk Ends. My copy is more than a little ratty, but then, it’s been read countless times since my mother gave it to me at the tender age of seven. (It was my favorite book for most of my childhood – superseded only by Lord of the Rings, years later.)

And I just found out that more books of his poetry and illustrations were published after his death! I’m so excited – just ordered my copies from Amazon. Yes, his poems are silly, but there’s great wisdom in silliness, too.

And – speaking of wisdom – are you wondering who the greatest sage of the 20th century might be? Why, isn’t it obvious? It’s none other than Mr. Theodor Geisel, who wrote my personal motto:

If you never did, you should!
These things are fun, and fun is good.

– Dr. Seuss, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

We now end this outburst of poetry and return you to your usual creative-mischief channel. 🙂

May 1, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Another dye cube, and some thoughts on color mixing

I finished the Procion MX Sun Yellow – Mixing Red – Mixing Blue dye “cube” a week or so ago, but only finished photographing it a day or two ago. I found it fascinating to compare this “cube” to the Gold – Mixing Red – Intense Blue cube I finished a few weeks ago – here are some photos and analysis for you.

We’ll start with a photo of the Sun Yellow – Mixing Red and Gold – Mixing Red color combinations (no blue in either mix):

Combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples — Sun Yellow – Mixing Red – Mixing Blue light cube level 0

These were all dyed at the same concentrations. Left to right, the concentrations are 0, 0.06%, 0.12%, 0.25%, and 0.5% DOS in yellow; bottom to top are the same set of concentrations in Mixing Red. There is virtually no difference between the two color combinations except in the bottom row – which is pure Sun Yellow on left and and pure Gold on the right. This is largely because the Gold is a slightly more reddish yellow (like Sun Yellow with a bit of red added), so when the Mixing Red gets into the act, it overwhelms the very slight hue difference between Sun Yellow and Gold, making the combinations look identical. Put another way, the Gold looks a bit like Sun Yellow plus maybe .005% Mixing Red, so when you throw 0.06% Mixing Red into the mix, the 0.005% difference gets obliterated.

Now, let’s see what happens when you add a tiny bit of the two different blues to the two essentially-identical combinations of yellow and blue. This is the same mix of dyes as in the previous photo, except with .06% Mixing Blue added on the left, and .06% Intense Blue on the right.

Here you can see that the Intense Blue (right) is a much weaker mixing color than the Mixing Blue (left) – it has a slightly dulling effect on the bright colors in the first photo, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of the Mixing Blue. The Intense Blue doesn’t even have enough mixing power to turn the Gold at bottom left to green!

Here is the same cube with a little more of the blues: 0.12% Mixing Blue on left, 0.12% Intense Blue on the right.

Again, you can see that the Intense Blue on the right is far weaker than the Mixing Blue on the left. You can also start to see differences in the hue between the Intense Blue-Mixing Red mixes and the Mixing Blue/Mixing Red mixes – the Mixing Blue combinations produce less saturated (duller) colors than the Intense Blue/Mixing Red combinations.

What happens if you compare the dyes at roughly similar combinations of visual strength? Here is 0.12% Mixing Blue on the left, and 0.25% Intense Blue on the right.

You’ll notice that the Intense Blue – even at double the concentration – still isn’t quite as strong as the Mixing Blue, but that it produces a slightly “cooler” set of colors than the Mixing Blue, which has redder undertones.

Here is level 3 – 0.25% of each of the blues:

Now the temperature shift is becoming more obvious, as is the overall brighter (more saturated) colors achieved with the Intense Blue (left). That’s largely because the Intense Blue is a more saturated blue than the Mixing Blue (right). When you mix two colors together you can never get a more saturated shade than the original colors. But it’s also because the Intense Blue is weaker (= less blue to dull down the oranges) and because it has more yellow in it than the Mixing Blue, which means it dulls down the oranges in the middle of the “square” less strongly (they both contain lots of yellow).

Here is the final level of the “light” cube, with 0.5% of each of the blues:

And here are the darker shades. I didn’t have time to set up a comparison of these to the Intense Blue combinations, but adding them for completeness, so you can see the full set of concentrations. Left to right, and top to bottom, the concentrations are 0, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, and 4% DOS for Sun Yellow and Mixing Red. Each level has a single amount of Mixing Blue, indicated in the caption.

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 0% blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 0% blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 0.5% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 0.5% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 1% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 1% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 2% Mixing blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 2% Mixing blue

Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples - 4% blue — Darker combinations of Procion MX Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, Mixing Blue dye samples – 4% blue

And that’s it for now!