Many things

Thing one: color mixing with chemical dyes.

Today I took out my fiber-reactive primaries, cyan, magenta, and yellow. I mixed small, strong solutions and attempted to create my own, practical color wheel. It was, ummm, interesting.

The photo is really a fairly good representation of what I got. You can see a little bit of the word "magenta" by the magenta. The cyan is a really fat stroke with a dark blue blob on both ends. The yellow is the only thing that looks even remotely like yellow, and it's stained a little green because my brush wasn't clean enough.

What do we learn from this? Cyan and magenta mix in a fairly straightforward way into shades of purple. Any tiny bit of magenta in yellow, or cyan, and you get orange or green. Tangerine and chartreuse are going to have to be mixed using drops of weak solutions of magenta and cyan, there's just no way to get a small enough measurable quantity of powdered dye. Note to self; must find out if I can store fiber-reactive dye stocks for long periods.

In other news, I made a colossal mess the first time I tried to mix fiber-reactive primaries. I mixed a lot of yellow and a tiny bit of magenta, then added a tiny bit of blue and immediately got gray. Should have known....added a lot more yellow and got brown. At this point, but it aside, and mixed up a batch of cyan. I added a few dribbles of brown to the blue to make it less crayonish, and got a lovely turquoise.

Today I took that brown, and added cyan until I had a nice, rich forest green. I turned a mess into something pretty! Yay! And, I dyed a whole pound of bamboo with it.

I also invented a new colorway for the BFL; it's a gray and a kind of gun-metal blue and garnet; I'm calling it "Ashes of Roses. It's way prettier than it sounds; I'll post a photo when it's rinsed and dried.

Still more today: I finally took about half of my cherry wood chips, and the soaking liquid (denatured alcohol with some water), and added water and put them over low heat for a few hours. Tomorrow I'll be able to strain them and actually dye some mordanted wool. The 12 (!) skeins of undyed yarn I mordanted the other day are almost dry....

I also got in the mail an order for natural dyes; ground madder, black oak bark, and safflowers. I'm really looking forward to playing around with the safflower.

More later...