All colours are there. creating shade cards

There is a tendency for all of us to use dye colours straight from the pot, without mixing and creating new shades, unless of course there are small quantities of liquor left at the end of a project. It is time consuming and expensive to make your own shade cards. This year I am working with two Weavers, Spinners and Dyers guilds to produce, hopefully, the shades that can be produced with all 16 of the Texere Acid Dye range. Hundreds of skeins and many cards to file the colours have had to be made and distributed, but later this month the project will be close to completion. Fingers Crossed!!! Above are photos of the first batch of samples, waiting to be threaded on to the file cards. Don't they look great! It seems a shame to split them up.

Creating Dye Shade Cards.

Dyeing your own yarn or fibre is often a task we are nervous about. What if you don’t get the colour you want, or you damage the fibre, the colour doesn’t take or isn’t wash fast? There are several reasons why crafts people buy dyes and use them’ straight from the bottle’. I enjoy dyeing my own materials, producing a third colour where two blend and often don’t mind if I achieve a less than even colour take up. The end product has life, individuality, a charm of its own and there can be great satisfaction in knowing it is ‘one of a kind’.

Creating your own shade cards can be very useful and save time in future projects. I keep project sheets and dyed yarn samples and notes from most of my projects. There comes a time when you want to ‘do something different’, use a different combination of colours to help motivation, inspiration and inject freshness in your work. Changing your colour schemes is a great place to start. Having a set of colour samples to ‘play’ with can help you make a different choice.

The ingredients for this project are yarn and dye chemicals. Make sure you have sufficient of each before you begin. For an accurate, repeatable colour, your yarn should be clean, grease and dirt free, so you may need to scour it before dying. Accuracy in the measuring process is also important, so suitable tools are needed.

A check list of equipment:-

Dyes

Fixing Agent

Mixing the dye solution.

A 1% dye solution, 1ml dye powder to 100ml water, will dye 100g yarn or fibre to a medium depth of colour and is a useful strength for such a project.

Very Useful/Valuable Group Workshop

Another Bedfordshire Guild member and I wanted to create shade cards for the dyes we used regularly, to enable us to create the colour shades we wanted for our projects without experimentation each time.

I soon realised the quantity of materials needed to achieve this were rather more than either of us could afford, either in time or resources. The ideal opportunity came when I was asked to run a workshop on the use of synthetic dyes. Others too were nervous about using dyes on their precious hand-spun yarn and bought fibre, so it was agreed that it would be worthwhile for me to organise a workshop where by we could produce a set of shade cards for each participant. It was also agreed that the dye range most commonly used by our members is the Kemtex acid dye range.

With 16 colours in the range, it was soon obvious that 10 shades from each pair of colours meant a huge number of samples. Having done this exercise with other dye ranges I decided that 5 samples for each 2 colours would be adequate, less expensive and more achievable. When another group, hurrah, expressed an interest in the project it became possible to create a more comprehensive sampling. The work of both groups could be shared giving all participants a set of dye samples.

I set about planning and organising. 16 colours, each mixed with the other 15 in the range multiplied by 5, this meant 600 samples in total and rather too many, even for 2 groups of 10 people this meant a mammoth task. So for the time being I decided not to include black, navy, chestnut and brown in the project.

The other requirement was woollen yarn, but just how much was needed? I found that 15 winds on my small niddy-noddy of DK yarn weighed 5g and that this length would be sufficient to give 30 samples of each shade. This was enough for 2 groups with a few left over. I managed to source this as Woolfest, buying from a supplier who sold only at the bigger shows but at the very reasonable price of £20 per kilo.

So, 12 dyes, 66 combinations mixed in 5 different proportions = 330 skeins, plus a skein for each colour in the range and each colour with black in the proportion of 9/1, 362 skeins in all, 1810g or yarn. I needed to buy 2 kilo yarn. (Using all 16 dye colours means 600 samples in all and 3kilo of yarn!!!!!!)