YARNS AND COLORS FOR GREEN CRACKLE PROJECT

Also a note at the end on photography for those interested in such matters
Posted by Peg in South Carolina

Taking a break from looking at the computer screen, I checked to see if I needed to order any yarn.  It turns out that I have plenty of 60/2 silk, which is for both the warp and the pattern weft.  But I seem to have no more 120/2 silk, which is for the binder weft.


By the way, for the curious, the piece of yellow at the bottom left corner is the first piece I wove—a yellow wool and mohair afghan which I keep draped over my computer chair.

120/2 silk is very fine, but fortunately Treenway Silks offers it on cones as well as skeins. That means that I will not have to wind cones from skeins before I wind smaller skeins for the dye baths. So my order is in.
 

I do not have enough of the silk tram I ordered from Habu.  I plan on using this for some, but not all, of the pattern wefts.  A phone call will be in order tomorrow.

And I have started work on the dye formulas I want to sample.  They are mostly some different variations of yellow-green.  I will be mixing Lanaset/Sabraset dyes and will use SAB Sun Yellow,  SAB Mustard Yellow, SAB Turquoise and SAB Royal Blue in various proportions. 

After I finish the yellow-green sampling, I will take the colors I like and want to use and add varying degrees of red-violet to them.  Red-violet is the complement of lemon yellow, so I can use a bit of it to tone down the various lemon-yellows.  Using a bit more of the red-violet should give me some possible browns to use.
 
There is no red-violet in SAB dyes so I am using a formula I have used in another sampling and like.  It  uses SAB Scarlet, SAB Violet, and Washfast Acid Magenta in various proportions.

Then I will do the same thing with violet.  There is a SAB Violet but I don’t like it alone.  So I will combine it with SAB Royal Blue an Washfast Acid Magenta, which will give it a more brilliant character.

Also on the sampling to-do list is using black to create varying degrees of grays.  Then I plan to combine one or more of these grays with any browns I find from earlier trials that I like.  I will see what happens.

These formulas are now made up only in terms of percentages, not in terms of actual amount of dye.  I need to wind and weigh the skeins to determine the actual amount of each dye stock solution.

I will be winding small skeins of 20/2 silk.  I use 20/2 silk instead of 60/2 because it is much heavier and so I do not have to make very larger skeins for the dye samplings.

It looks like I will be starting with about 25 skeins.  I will do more if I see some more ideas I want to try as a result of this batch of dyeing.  So my next steps are:

1. Wind 10-yard skeins of 20/2 silk.
2. Weigh the skeins
3. Rewrite the dye stock formulas in terms of actual amounts of dye needed.

So now it is time for some actual physical labor!  At least I have quite a bit of 20/2 already wound on a cone so, at least for now, I do not have to wind another skein of it onto a cone.

Photography Note:  I have a new camera which lets me take far better pictures, both inside and outside, than my old one.  But this photo reveals the difficulty that still exists of getting colors right.  The major issue was caused, I think, by the brightness of the LED screen versus the comparative dimness of the rest of the room.  The result is that the overall colors are just a tad too dark, except for the computer screen.

Because I was most concerned with the colors on the computer screen, I selected it, moved it to its own layer and played with it.  The result is better, except that now the blue borders that Windows uses for its various toolbars are definitely not blue.

I could have selected the entire computer screen, reversed the selection so that everything else was selected instead and then lightened that a tad.  But I did not think about that because only what was on the computer screen concerned me.

There are other issues as well.

• The round yellow light on my phone to the right of the computer.  The light is really red…………   Sigh……….
• The glare of the blue button at the bottom of the screen.

Finally I just have a ton left to learn on using this camera.  I doubt that I shall learn it all in this lifetime!

Related Posts:  
Dyeing Records
Dye Stock Solutions

“Yarns and Colors for Green Crackle Project” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on September 10, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.