I made my first attempt at dyeing the color wheel (using Lanaset dyes) yesterday, and got fairly decent results. I only hit one color “dead on”, but that was more than I had expected! and it was a single shade (turquoise), so not that hard to manage.
Here are the closest-matching yarns, wrapped and set against the color wheel:
As you can see, the turquoise is dead on, the red is a hair too blue and too high chroma (intensity of color), the orange is way too yellow and too high value (i.e. too light), and the yellow is too high chroma (intensity of color).
I dyed seven other skeins as well, but they were obviously non-matching, so I didn’t wind them.
Here is a table with some of my initial notes and speculations (click to read the table, it’s too big to fit into the regular blog post). The number/letter sequences are references to the Munsell color notation – see Wikipedia for the details.
I am definitely developing a discerning eye for color, though it isn’t easy – the green hue in particular I had to stare at for awhile, because it’s nearly a perfect match but not quite, and figuring out which direction it was “off” took some doing. But it is getting easier with practice.
Today I am going to a weaver’s estate sale, and then spending some time with a friend who’s coming over to visit and do crafty stuff together. I hope to fit some dyeing and weaving time in, though!
I don’t know if it is true when you see the actual samples. But on the computer screen, the yarns are clearly shinier than the colors on the color wheel. I would find it very difficult to judge which is an exact match because of the shine factor. And it looks like, on my LED screen said at appropriate resolution, that there is no exact match.