Tien Chiu

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May 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu

More dye samples

Ginny, bless her heart,  emailed me on Friday letting me know she had nearly finished winding my dye samples  onto bobbins.  So I went and picked them up today.  Beautiful colors – I’ve been working with the blue-purple-magenta range and really like the color blends I’ve been getting.  Here’s a photo:

dye sample sets
3 dye sample sets

For this round of dye samples, I’m only mixing two colors, in varying proportions, systematically working my way from one color to another in units of 10%.  So I start with 100% color 1, then 90% color 1 and 10% color 2, then 80-20 color 1 color 2, and so on until I reach 100% color 2.  Eleven samples in all.  I’m basically doing all combinations of “pure” Sabraset colors, which will be a total of some 300-ish skeins if I recall correctly.  (For some close-to-each-other colors, I’m only doing 6 combinations, jumping by 20% each time.)

After I’m done dyeing, I (or more accurately Ginny) wind a few yards onto a cardboard or plastic bobbin:

Labels for dye samples
Labels for dye samples

This tells me at a glance exactly how to reproduce the color.

Then I file all these samples away in a dye notebook.  When I want to select a color, I can just go and flip through my dye notebooks until I find a close match, then figure out how to modify it to get the shade I want.  Or, if I’m selecting a palette, I can flip through until I find some shades I like, pull out the bobbins, and lay them next to each other for comparison.  Because the bobbins are labeled, I have no trouble figuring out how to put them back afterward.

For a detailed description of how I make my samples, see my dyeing page.

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, dyeing Tagged With: dye samples

Previous post: Ephemeral Eagles
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Comments

  1. Cynthia Teague says

    May 3, 2010 at 10:34 am

    What fun — I love making sample sets like this.

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