dyeing | Tien Chiu's Blog

June 11, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Pictures of 1000 dye samples are now online!

A quick note to let y’all know: I’ve posted 1000 of my 1500 dye samples on my website, along with an extensive write-up about my dye process. The other 500 samples are still being photographed, but they should be up later this week.

Here’s the link to the master page:

Dye Sample Project

Please spread the word! It was a LOT of work photographing everything, color-correcting the images, and writing/posting the documentation for the samples. I did it because I thought others might find them useful – so please let others know they’re there!

May 22, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Breakthrough

The last two years have been a bit of a puzzle for me. I’ve done virtually no weaving – which is pretty darn odd, considering I quit my job so I could focus on developing my career as a textile artist. At first I thought it was because I was busy doing other things – mostly, working on my business and fulfilling my duties as Board President at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Both of those took (and are still taking) a ton of time and emotional energy. But two years? I was starting to wonder if I’d made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I seemed to have very little interest in weaving. But I couldn’t seem to come up with anything that triggered my enthusiasm.

Then two things happened. The first was getting a close look at Itchiku Kubota’s kimono, which are both beautiful and masterful. Conceiving and executing these kimono requires not only vision, but impressive technical skills and deep understanding of the design possibilities of each technique. Years of technical mastery are needed to make them.

This is very different from how most textile artists currently work. Current textile art emphasizes message; it’s about what you’re saying with your art, not about the skill and precision with which the art is made. In fact, too-good construction can even make your work suspect, because good craftsmanship is associated with craft, not art. (Insert the usual arguments about craft vs. art here.)

As a result, most of the textile art I’ve seen recently, while powerful, has been pretty simple, technically speaking. Most of it could be composed by someone with just a few years of experience, and made within a matter of weeks or months. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that style; it’s a perfectly valid approach to art, and it results in some remarkable pieces. It works for a lot of artists.

But it doesn’t work for me. My natural preference is for work that is intricate; that combines multiple media; that requires technical mastery; and that takes many months or years to complete. But I’ve seen relatively little modern work that fits that description. (Except for the American Tapestry Alliance shows, which I love!)

So when I asked a lot of established artists how to study and develop a career as a textile artist, much of their advice on who and what to study came from a body and philosophy of art totally different from what I loved. And I didn’t see my style of work reflected in any of the textile art I’d seen. Technical virtuosity seemed stuck in a past that emphasized skill over creativity; modern art emphasized creativity and downplayed skill. Who was doing the kind of complex, technical art that I wanted to do? Where was my tribe?

Alice Walker, in her essay “Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” says:

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.

Kubota made my kind of art. Seeing his kimono sent a shock of recognition through me. This is the kind of work I want to do…that intricacy, that breadth of vision, that fusion of multiple disciplines. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! And – having finally found my tribe – I suddenly felt less alone, and a lot more hopeful.

Another thing that has really encouraged me was a discussion I had recently with a museum curator. We were talking about another jacquard artist’s work, and the person I was talking to said, “You know, I think she did herself a disservice when she decided to limit herself to what could be done on a jacquard loom, as opposed to using whatever technique would help her say what she wanted to say.”

I stopped for a moment, thunderstruck. Oh! Duh!

Because, of course, I had fallen into the same trap. It’s a natural mistake: when you buy a very expensive hammer, it’s hard not to feel that you need to pound a LOT of nails to justify your purchase. So, having bought a jacquard loom, I had naturally been envisioning myself as a jacquard weaver – weaving exquisite pieces that exploited the powerful capabilities of the loom. And focusing on weaving to the exclusion of other disciplines.

But I’ve never been terribly excited about handwoven cloth. (Yes, I know that’s a strange confession for a well-known weaver.) To me, cloth is mainly interesting as a raw material for other processes – dyeing and sewing, maybe origami. And flat cloth? It leaves me, well, flat. Since I had been envisioning jacquard-woven flat wall hangings, is it any surprise that I lost my enthusiasm for starting new work?

The last revelation I’ve had has to do with the question of art vs. artistic career. My style of art is quite different from most of what is currently being exhibited and sold. And because I want to put hundreds or thousands of hours into each piece, building a body of work will be really slow. As a result, taking my approach may seriously impact my career as an artist. I have been noodling unhappily over this for the last two years. Kubota’s kimono have knocked me clean off the fence I was sitting on, because if I can make work like those kimono – or even get close – I do not give a flying fuck about whether I ever have an artistic career.

Which, I think, finally qualifies me to call myself an artist. 🙂

There’s a wonderful passage in Richard Bach’s Illusions that describes how I feel. The protagonist (Richard) has been barnstorming around the Midwest, offering people short airplane rides for a small fee. In the process, he meets the Messiah, whose name is Donald Shimoda. Richard decides he wants to be a Messiah too, so he studies with Donald. In this section, Richard has just given his “Sermon on the Mount” teaching to Donald for the umpteenth time:

I looked at him. “Too wordy?”

“As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of your audience unless you learn to keep it short!”

“Well, what’s wrong with losing ninety percent of my audience?” I shot back at him. “What’s wrong with losing ALL my audience? I know what I know and I talk what I talk! And if that’s wrong then that’s just too bad. The airplane rides are three dollars, cash!”

“You know what?” Shimoda stood up, brushing the hay off his blue jeans.

“What?” I said petulantly.

“You just graduated. How does it feel to be a Master?”

“Frustrating as hell.”

He looked at me with an infinitesimal smile. “You get used to it,” he said.

Having thought through all that, I have some very exciting ideas for combining jacquard designs with dyeing. In particular, I want to cross-dye jacquard-woven cloth woven from cotton and polyester threads. Cotton and polyester are ideal for this purpose because dyes for cotton (fiber-reactive dyes) do not dye polyester, and dyes for polyester (disperse dyes) do not dye cotton. So you can weave a pattern in white on white, print on the fabric using fiber-reactive dyes, and then dye it in a different design using disperse dyes. The finished piece will show the cotton in the fiber-reactive pattern and the polyester in the disperse-dye pattern.

This is a bit hard to envision, so here is a sample I made a few years ago while playing with this idea. The warp is Tencel (or maybe cotton), the weft is alpaca, and it’s dyed with both acid and fiber-reactive dyes. The pale blue fiber-reactive dye is applied first (it dyes both cotton and protein fiber), then the thickened red-purple acid dye is stenciled on. The acid dye dyes the alpaca but not the silk, giving an interesting pebbled texture. (You can read more about the process in this blog post.)

This is pretty interesting in itself, but throw in a jacquard loom and some really interesting stuff becomes possible. For example: suppose you weave an image of a tree, where the tree is woven in polyester and the background in cotton or mostly-cotton. You can weave the trunk of the tree in a “bark” pattern that is mostly polyester with some textured cotton ridges going through it, and then paint different colors/designs on the polyester and the cotton parts of the bark. You could weave birds in cotton half-hidden against a canopy of polyester leaves. Then you could stencil a pattern of light and dark green on the polyester leaves without touching the birds, and come back and paint the cotton birds later.

Or you could go abstract and do shibori or tied-resist dyeing (twice!). Or you could try to do woven shibori! Depending on thickness, polyester thread may be strong enough to use as tie threads…and polyester has memory, so there is also the option of permanently-set crimp cloth. The possibilities are truly endless, and well worth exploring. This could be a LOT of fun!

May 4, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Pilgrimage

Most artists find their way into art gradually. Their interest develops over several years, often early in their lives.

I didn’t arrive at art quite so gradually. In fact, I regarded fiber arts as a not-terribly-important hobby until December 1995. Then a friend handed me a copy of Smithsonian Magazine, saying, “I saw this article and thought you’d find it interesting.” I opened it, and was floored by a photo of the most amazing art I’d ever seen. It was a kimono, Burning Sun, by Japanese artist Itchiku Kubota.

At that moment, I knew that what I wanted to do with my life, more than anything else, was to make something as beautiful, powerful, and technically masterful as that kimono. It had never occurred to me that fiber art could be art before – I’d been spinning yarn for sweaters and designing interesting quilt tops, which people thought were artistic. But in my mind, they weren’t art. Kubota’s kimono could stand against the most masterful painters and sculptors. They opened my mind to a whole new world of what could be done with textiles.

Alas, Kubota’s work normally resides in Japan, at the Itchiku Kubota Museum. A trip to Japan was on my bucket list, but it didn’t appear likely to happen anytime soon.

So when I found out the kimono were on exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada, well…

Tien with Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun, at the Textile Museum of Canada — Tien with Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun, at the Textile Museum of Canada

…that’s me, standing next to the artwork that inspired my calling.

It was amazing to see Burning Sun in person. Many artworks don’t live up to their photos when viewed in real life. But Burning Sun’s photos didn’t do it justice – not even close! – because an image of the full piece can’t capture the intricate detail.

For example, here’s an closeup near the bottom of the left sleeve:

Closeup of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Closeup of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

At this distance, you can see some details – stitched-resist (shibori) dyeing, delicate brush painting, and embroidery.

Getting closer, though, you can make out more:

Even closer view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Even closer view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

Now you can see that there are two kinds of embroidery thread – rough silver thread at the middle right, and a smooth, glossy thread at top right. You also get a glimpse of the wonderful textures created by the shibori stitching.

And if you stick your nose right up against the fabric (don’t worry, I didn’t touch it!):

Super close view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's Burning Sun — Super close view of the left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s Burning Sun

Now you can see that the base cloth isn’t plain weave – it’s woven in horizontal ridges punctuated by irregularly placed floats, creating a textured fabric with floating flecks of light.

I spent two days in the exhibit, from opening until closing (though I did take a break for lunch on both days). I took 1,297 photos of the 40 kimono – though I wish I’d taken a few more, since I’ve found some gaps already. The first day I ran madly about documenting/photographing EVERYTHING, because I wanted detailed shots I could study later. Near the end of the second day, I had a few hours left, so I spent some time just looking at, and absorbing, the artistry in the kimono.

I would really have liked a third day (or another three weeks, months, years…), but two was enough to get most of what I needed. Kubota’s work is inspirational to me in so many ways – the sweeping vision, the incredible technical mastery (across multiple disciplines!), the integration of conceptually different design elements (physical texture, flat areas of ink drawing, shibori dyeing), and the ability to design at multiple scales, from the sweeping vista to tiny stitches. It is ambitious, masterful, and complex. I have never seen anything like it.

Here are some hopefully illustrative photos.

This first photo is of five kimono from the “Symphony of Light” – envisioned as a set of 80+ kimono depicting the seasons of Mt. Fuji and then expanding into the universe. (Kubota only finished about half of the Symphony before he died.)

6 kimono from Itchiku Kubota's "Symphony of Light" — 6 kimono from Itchiku Kubota’s “Symphony of Light”

As you can see, when lined up next to each other, the kimono form a single sweeping image.

In fact, this set of six kimono is actually part of a much larger set, that all merge into a single image. Here is a panorama with 13 kimono (you’ll have to click in to see the larger version; it’s hard to make out details if you don’t). You can see how the seasons merge into one another, late summer to fall to early winter.

13 kimono in Itchiku Kubota's "Symphony of Light" — 13 kimono in Itchiku Kubota’s “Symphony of Light”

I believe that all the kimono of the Symphony of Light can be lined up in this way. What a breathtaking vision!

But wait! That’s not all! Each kimono also stands alone. Let’s look at just one kimono – Hin (Nostalgia). It’s the fifth one from the right:

Itchiku Kubota's kimono "Hin (Nostalgia)" — Itchiku Kubota’s kimono “Hin (Nostalgia)”

While it was designed as part of a larger set, it also forms a complete composition when viewed by itself.

But look a little closer. See that boring-looking dark brown section in the bottom right corner of the left sleeve, just above the “cloud” at the bottom? This is what it looks like from a foot away:

closeup, left sleeve, Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — closeup, left sleeve, Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

Wow! That boring brown spot is really interesting! The variety of textures is amazing – the smoothness of the “fog” drifting through the bottom, and the longer, sharper creases traveling in different directions on the right side, to give motion to the misty tendrils. The trees are composed of delicate ink painting in the center of each brown area, outlining the trunk, and horizontal ridges suggesting branches. (And if you look to the left, in the medium brown area, you’ll see some very light brush painting suggesting more trees hidden in mist.)

Further up the sleeve, there’s another great set of textures:

top left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — top left sleeve of Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

I love this particular section because it’s almost all texture – but texture used in a deliberate and astoundingly precise manner to create movement, depth, and patterning. There are four textures just in this small section! And the textures are coordinated with subtle dyework to create the impression of layers of mist shifting over the mountain.

What blows my mind isn’t just the technical excellence of the work but the multidimensional expertise needed to envision it. Each of the design components Kubota is using – texture, color, line – is created using a different kind of surface design technique. Each of those methods “thinks” differently. It’s hard enough to design using even one of those three methods, which is why most textile artists work inside a single branch of surface design. But here Kubota is integrating three very different methods in a single piece, combining them into something far more powerful.

Here’s a shot from near the bottom of the kimono that shows a similar combination of techniques:

bottom of Itchiku Kubota's "Hin (Nostalgia)" — bottom of Itchiku Kubota’s “Hin (Nostalgia)”

Here the shibori ridges create earth and tree branches. To get crisp definition in the tree trunks – not achievable with shibori – Kubota uses ink pen. And, because neither of those techniques produces luster or luminescence, Kubota’s decided to embroider the tops of the trees with scattered stitches in smooth, lustrous gold thread. This gives the effect of sunlight glinting off the treetops.

Kubota’s work has had a profound impact on me because he worked the way I want to work, and his work shatters a lot of the constraints that were suggested to me as a budding artist. For example, I was advised to pick three or four techniques to work with, in a single medium. The idea is to achieve greater mastery by exploring one area deeply rather than trying to integrate a lot of unrelated methods. Kubota works with just a few techniques, but drawn from vastly different areas of surface design. It’s inspiring to me to see that this can work – because my natural inclination is to work across multiple disciplines. Trying to focus in a single area felt terribly limiting.

I’m still processing all my thoughts and feelings about the exhibit. Seeing Kubota’s work has helped me recognize some of the limitations I’d imposed on myself, and reassured me that there is enormous potential in my multidisciplinary approach. The design philosophy embodied in his kimono is making me think deeply about what it means to me to be an artist, what I want to strive for in my work, and what I want to learn. And, of course, I’m also learning a ton about design by examining the work of a master.

Kubota’s work is also making me feel enthusiastic about weaving again, which is great after a nearly two-year hiatus. I was seriously wondering whether I had made a mistake buying a jacquard loom, because I felt like I might be done with weaving. But seeing his work has made me think of some really cool stuff I could weave (and dye) – and I can’t wait to get started on it!

Over the next couple weeks, I’m planning to write a series of blog posts about some of the thoughts the kimono have inspired – both philosophy and design. Stay tuned!

January 25, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Adventures in color

After picking up the wound sample cards (and visiting my relatives) in Maryland, Mike and I flew to Chicago to visit his family. It was cold in Chicago. -6F, with a wind chill of -22F.

Now, I’ve lived in California for the past 30 years, so I can confidently tell you that there is no such thing as a negative temperature. I have no idea what temperature it actually is when they stick a minus sign in front of the number, but it can’t possibly be real. It’s probably more like the temperature of outer space, which I estimate to be somewhere around 15F (well beyond the point where your avocado and lemon trees die, and also the coldest temperature ever recorded in my hometown). So I spent pretty much the entire time indoors, looking at the thermometer in disbelief. If the gods had intended people to live in places that cold, they would never have created California.

While trapped inside by our sudden transportation into the interstellar void, I decided to try photographing my samples. I already knew that the standard iPhone camera app would be insufficient, so I had gotten the ProCamera app for my iPhone, and used it to adjust the white balance of the image. Then I shot photos of all the samples. Here’s an example photo:

Procion MX dye sample sheet - cube method — Procion MX dye sample sheet – Gold, Mixing Red, Navy

Then I checked it on my laptop monitor, which I had color calibrated using equipment borrowed from a professional photographer friend (Joe Decker, who shoots unbelievably beautiful Arctic landscapes). Alas, the app had not captured the colors correctly.

This started a long chain of progressively more desperate attempts to get color-accurate photos of the samples. Even assistance from a trained professional didn’t help:

Here’s a composite photo showing some of my attempts. Unbelievably, all these photos are of the same two sample cards – just with different apps, color correction, and lighting. (They are all shot with my iPhone 7, but that wasn’t the problem – I tested it against the camera of a semipro photographer friend, and – surprisingly – the iPhone rendered pretty much the same colors as his much more expensive camera.)

As you can see, the colors are similar, but not the same. And when I tell you that none of these is exactly the same color as the real-life sample cards (even under the same lighting), you will begin to understand the depths of my existential despair.

Well, at least I can take some comfort in the knowledge that my inability to capture the colors accurately is largely irrelevant – unless your monitor has been calibrated using professional-grade equipment, the colors you are seeing won’t be accurate anyway. (Monitors are notorious for distorting colors.)

I’m still planning to photograph and post the samples on my website, though. Even with shifted colors there’s a lot of information in the samples that will be helpful to other dyers. I hope to post the samples I have within the next month or two.

After returning from our 10-day holiday trip, I had 36 hours at home before flying out again to San Diego to give a program and a workshop for the San Diego Weavers Guild. Here’s a photo of me giving my talk about brainstorming:

Tien talking at the San Diego Weavers Guild

This was one of my last in-person workshops. I’ve decided that it makes more sense for me to focus on developing my online classes, so I’m no longer booking any in-person teaching. I will be giving one talk at Convergence (about critiquing your work) and will be teaching at ANWG 2019, but that’s basically it.

I had planned to stay in San Diego for a few extra days to visit some friends, but felt like I was coming down sick, so I decided to cut my trip short and fly home on Monday. This turned out to be an excellent decision, because I broke a tooth Monday morning at breakfast. Being an overachiever, I didn’t just crack it a little – I split it clean in half, right down to the root. I grabbed the next flight home; Mike picked me up at the airport and ferried me straight to the dentist. Who was quite impressed by the swath of destruction:

Since there was nothing left to save, the next step (two days later) was a hot date with an oral surgeon, which ended like this:

Now I have a titanium peg in my jaw. In another four months or so, after the titanium implant has bonded to the bone, I’ll get a crown on the implant and will finally look normal again.

Meanwhile, for those wondering about the puzzle, I finally started it! I decided to begin with this tray:

And after about 2.5 hours, here’s what I had assembled:

puzzle progress - 2.5 hours — puzzle progress – 2.5 hours

It’s proving quite difficult – partly because the pieces are so featureless, but also because the pieces are designed to be ambiguous about fit – so it’s not just finding the right color pieces, but also about making sure they actually fit. Usually I don’t find out about misplaced pieces until considerably later in the puzzle. It’s frustrating, because I prefer puzzles in which a piece that appears to fit actually does.

And so far, I think I’ve foiled the puzzle gods by covering up the puzzle when not in use. But of course it is a bad idea to underestimate the mighty powers and fiendish cleverness of the puzzle gods, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m still not quite caught up to my present-day adventures, but this is getting long again, so I’ll end here. But I’ll leave you with one of the marvelous photos captured by our cat-sitter while we were away. Somehow she manages to get better photos of Tigress and Fritz in ten days than I do all year – and she sends us twenty or thirty photos every day we’re away, so we get to see our “kids” having fun with her. (It helps with the shakes – “cold turkey” cat withdrawal can be seriously dangerous.)

Anyway, here is the best one of the lot. I’m going to save it to blackmail Tigress with after she becomes rich and famous.

January 16, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Dye adventures

The last few weeks have been jam-packed, so I’m going to tell the story over a few blog posts. This one is about my Anything-Worth-Doing-Is-Worth-Overdoing Procion MX dye sample project.

The adventure started with a trip to spend Christmas with my family. The first challenge was packing for the trip. In addition to five fruitcakes, Christmas gifts, and clothes, I needed to pack 500 ten-gram skeins of cotton dye samples from the massive sample-dyeing project I did over the summer. My friend Carla and I had agreed to split the work: I would dye all 1500 skeins, and she would wind two sets of dye sample cards, one for me and one for her. She had wound 1,000 skeins onto cards already; I was bringing her the last 500 skeins. Which, of course, meant figuring out how to pack it.

For the uninitiated, 500 ten-gram skeins is a LOT of yarn. If you’re wondering how much, here’s a picture showing one set of samples – 250 skeins.

500 skeins, of course, is double that volume. We’re talking a giant suitcase full of yarn!

Which led to the first challenge – how do you bring an entire suitcase worth of yarn, plus clothes, etc. for your trip, when you only have one suitcase?

I thought I had solved that problem – buy an inexpensive duffel bag, stuff the clothes and non-breakable stuff into the duffel bag, and put the yarn in the suitcase. (Because if the airline destroyed the duffel bag, going around naked in the dead of winter would be way better than losing my dye samples. (Priorities!)) Then, once the skeins were delivered, I could fold the duffel bag and stick it into the suitcase.

All went well until I started packing. The first problem was predictable (and adorable!):

Both cats find luggage irresistible, of course. After all, what is luggage but a giant box? And what are boxes for, but to sit in?

Fortunately, I solved this problem long ago. I pulled out a couple other suitcases, opened them and set them on the bed, and started putting clothes into one of the other suitcases. Sensing an opportunity to get in the way, the cats immediately ran over and sat in the decoy suitcase. And I got the duffel bag. (Hey, when you’re just a lowly cat-slave human, you gotta be tricky!)

After I started packing, however, I realized there was a problem. I had an entire suitcase worth of yarn. I also had a half-suitcase of fruitcakes and Christmas gifts too fragile to put into a duffel bag. Basic physics says that you cannot fit 1.5 suitcases’ worth of stuff into 1 suitcase, even if you are a stupendous packer.

Anyone else would have figured this out days ago. But I got Cs in physics in college – it was my single worst subject. (Although, physics at Caltech is not exactly easy.) And I majored in math. There’s a reason Techers don’t let math majors figure out the bill at restaurants: we’re notoriously incompetent at basic arithmetic. So there was no obvious reason that I would have noticed that 1.5 is bigger than 1. Except, of course, that even a nitwit would have noticed this and bought another suitcase.

But I hadn’t. So there I was – the afternoon before leaving, short one suitcase. And we were going to the airport before dawn, so no opportunity to get a suitcase tomorrow, either.

Amazon PrimeNow to the rescue! It took over an hour (probably because it was December 23), but they delivered a giant suitcase that would be perfect for the job. I gleefully threw my yarn into the new suitcase, and we flew off to Maryland.

In between family celebrations and various get-togethers with friends, I got together with Carla, and together we surveyed our skeins. Here’s a photo showing most of our work:

Procion MX dye sample project - skeins and cards — Procion MX dye sample project – skeins and cards

It’s hard to convey the amount of yarn involved, but it filled up most of the room – I had to get creative to capture everything in a single shot. There are 1,250 hand-dyed skeins and 750 hand-wound sample cards – a total of 27.5 pounds of yarn. (250 skeins were completed and shipped to me in California already, so this is only 5/6 of the project.)

The skeins I brought are at the top of this shot:

And here are the boxes full of leftover skeins. (Each skein started at 10 grams, but after winding the cards and a few mini-skeins, there were still 7 grams left over.)

Procion MX dye cube experiment - skein leftovers — Procion MX dye cube experiment – skein leftovers

Finally, here is the stack of neatly-wound cards:

sample books for Procion MX dye sample project

Each book contains 125 samples, representing all possible combinations of three different dyes (a red, a blue, and a yellow) at 5 different concentrations.

Here’s a closeup of a single page:

Each card has a label on it with the names and concentrations of the three dyes that were used to produce the card. Here’s a closeup of a single card:

sample card for Procion MX dye sample project

Each label starts with the Color Index (CI) name for the dye. This is the “species name” of the dye – its unique identifier within the industry. The CI name never changes, whereas the “common name” of the dye can vary between suppliers. (For example, the Blue MX-2G on this card is called “Cobalt Blue” by Dharma Trading Company and “Mixing Blue” by Pro Chemical and Dye.)

Since no dye supplier actually uses the CI name, the second name is more descriptive. Since I bought my dyes from Pro Chemical and Dye, I decided to use their names for the dye colors, abbreviating them to fit onto the card. The full names of the dyes are Sun Yellow, Mixing Red, and Mixing Blue.

The last part of each line is the amount of each dye used. In this sample, 0.12% of Sun Yellow has been mixed with 0.25% Mixing Blue. There is no Mixing Red in this sample.

I’m in the process of documenting the project. I’ve been photographing each set of samples, trying to get the color as accurate as possible. For tediously technical reasons, taking photos that are true to color is really difficult. I’ve spent at least 10-12 hours fiddling with color checkers, gray cards, lighting, different cameras, and different kinds of post-processing. Each test shot was evaluated against the real-life sample cards on a monitor color-calibrated using a equipment borrowed from a professional photographer.

So far I’ve photographed 500 samples, with 500 left to go. Once I’ve gotten all the samples photographed, cropped, and color-corrected, I plan to put them up on my website, along with documentation about the dyeing methodology and process. Of course, the samples won’t be totally accurate to color – partly due to the limitations of my equipment, but mostly because monitors are notorious for shifting colors, so unless your monitor has been calibrated using photographic calibration equipment, what you see will be different from what I see. But it will hopefully give people some idea of how colors mix in dyeing. And, of course, if you put the time and money into calibrating your monitor, you’ll have something fairly accurate.

It’s getting late here and this post is getting too long, so I’ll end here, and take up the next part of my recent adventures in my next blog post. But I’ll leave you with a hint about a later part of my trip…with cats, of course! (Because, as Fritz and Tigress know, everything is better with cats!)

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