If you didn’t figure it out yet, I decided to stay home from SockFest. I just didn’t have it in me for several reasons, to drive all that way for two workshops and a social thing. Actually, the social stuff was why I wanted to go in the first place, people are everything to me. And with this wonderful Internet, I have so many friends and acquaintances who live nowhere near me. I could have met a handful of those folks today.

The good thing was that I have been running in circles for weeks, and this gave me a bit of connection with my beloved husband, Brian. We had a nice meal last night (homemade soup) and we took a nice walk around the block as the sun was still shining. It is around 50 degrees and sunny here, a real gift.

Last night I spent 4 hours in the dyeing studio making pretty rovings and yarns. I plan to spend the rest of the weekend doing more of the same. Today is ad day on Socknitters, but I doubt I’ll have my handpaint web page together by midnight! I’m not sure how I’ll handle that, but maybe I’ll just announce the sale here and on my private mailing list for yarns, and see how it goes. I won’t have lots of stock, but waiting until I have a warehouse full would mean I couldn’t do it for a long time.

A Small Dissertation on Different Ways to Think about Color

It is fun working with dyes. They are so different from polymer clay. Polymer is opaque color like paint. It is so simple to figure out… this color plus this color makes a third color that can be easily predicted, somewhere between the two beginning colors. If you go with the red/blue/yellow primary colors we were taught as children in school, you can come up with colors that are somewhat predictable.

I have done a lot with web/digital monitor-displayed art, where light is the medium. More color when you are working with light, makes a lighter color. Red plus blue plus green (red, blue and green are the primary colors when working with light) equals white! So medium blue plus red may make purple, but more blue and more red makes lighter colors, including a lighter purple, because it is more light. OK, that felt odd at first, but I got used to it.

Fortunately, I went to soft block printmaking before going directly to dyeing of wool. Some rubberstamp inks are called dye inks and they act a lot like wool dyes. If you add one color to another, you get a darker color, not one in between the two. (That is, unless in wooldyeing you also increase the amount of wool you are dyeing.) Dye inks use Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black as the primary colors, just like an inkjet printer you might have at home. It is transparent color, rather than the opaque of paint or polymer. Some people mix dyes while in the mindset of red/blue/yellow/opaque and I think this causes some frustrations in getting the transparent dye colors they wish to mix.

We could go further, and talk about the Munsell color system, where he studied how the eyes see color, not considering at all what the medium was and/or how to mix the color. Munsell found five primaries (red, yellow, green, blue, purple) as far as how the eye interprets colors once we mix them by whichever method is appropriate for our chosen medium.

Munsell defines color by hue (red/green, etc), value (dark/light), and chroma (saturation or intensity- mauve is low chroma and magenta is high chroma, even if the hue of either is red-purple). I would argue that in most media we also deal with whether a color is matte or shiny (think cotton versus mohair, or glaze on ceramics), and whether it is opaque or transparent (this last issue was very important for me when working with polymer clay). But now I’m going on and on too long on a pet subject, and I should stop before you all stop reading.

End of dissertation!

OK, so wool is my newest artful venture. So I have a learning curve with a new set of primary colors. Add to that the differences between superwash yarns and regular wool yarns/rovings. And the difference moisture content makes, and the percentage of acid and/or detergent added to the soak water and/or the dye. And how you steam, and the brand of dye you use, and… and… and…

Yet even with all the variables, I am loving wooldyeing. I’m going to sign off right now, to go rinse the fibers I steamed last night and let them start drying… then I’ll start again on a new batch of yarns/rovings to dye.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2003 at 12:14 pmand is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.