DULLED BLUE

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

I am not happy with the way the dulled blue turned out.  Not that the color isn’t perfectly beautiful.  I actually adore it.  But for what I am currently weaving, there are two problems:

1. The blue is not nearly dull enough
2. The blue has morphed into a blue-green

So I have changed the formulas.

YELLOW AND RED FOR ORANGE

First, I have drastically revised the orange, which, being the complement of blue, is the toner color.  Instead of having it consist of 85% SAB Sun Yellow and 15% SAB Scarlet, I used the following proportions: 60% SAB Sun Yellow and 40% SAB Scarlet.  I made this quite radical change because I realized that SAB Scarlet tends to lean towards yellow anyway.

ORANGE AND BLUE PROPORTIONS

Second, I revised the proportion of toner to the blue.  Because I wanted more dulling, instead of 90% SAB Royal Blue plus 10% of the toning orange, I am using 85% SAB Royal Blue plus 15% of the toning orange.

This last change makes me a little nervous.  Because there is more red in the orange this time, that alone will have a greater dulling effect, since red is a much stronger color than yellow.  Should I therefore have kept the proportions of blue to orange the same?  I will find out!

KEEPING RECORDS

When I do intentional dye sampling I keep pretty good records.  When I do some kind of gradated dye run, I wind the samples on a piece of card with limited notations and keep the complete records in a Word document.

When I am just sampling colors to see what they look like, I put swatches on large pieces of card with holes punched in to hold the sample swatches.  I keep similar colors on the same card and keep the cards in a 3-ring binder.

I also have good written records of the dyeing I do for my weaving projects.  But what I have consistently failed to do is to keep the swatches of those yarns I dyed. 

I plan to change that beginning now.  I am haunted by the possibility that somewhere I have made the right dulled blue for this project but for which I have no record; and so I am re-creating the wheel, so to speak.  Probably not true, but……

Related Post:  
Keeping Records
Changing My Mind Midstream

“Dulled Blue” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on June 8, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina