Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Color and Dye Class with Robin Edmundson

Shetland wool
 Robin Edmundson gave a class on color theory and acid dyeing last weekend at St. Mary of the Wood's White Violet Center.    I had a great time!

My favorite part of the class is the way my brain started to reel as I tried to grasp some of Albert Munsell's color theory.  The main idea is to imagine a sphere with the named colors (red, yellow, green, etc.) running around the equator.  At the top of the sphere the colors fade to white.  At the bottom, they fade to black.  From the skin of the sphere towards the center line the colors loose intensity, fading to greys.  I got most of that.  It was when they skewed the sphere that my brain started to hurt! (At some point I'll get a copy of "The New Munsell Student Color Set" and work on that skewing some more!

In the mean time, I have been merrily cutting photos out of magazines and pasting them onto color scheme pages.  Deciding what to do with the color schemes and my dyes is yet to come!


Cascade 220--not quite cardboard-esq
 This skein of yarn (cascade 220) and the shetland roving above were both dyed with stripes of intense color unevenly mixed with stripes of less intense color.  I was aiming to reproduce the shadow effects in a photograph of a stack of corrugated cardboard.  Both dye jobs failed.  Drat!

The shetland is a very orange, almost coppery.  It's actually a pretty color and I like it...it's just not cardboard-esq.  The skein of yarn suffered from an overfull dye pot.  It had to sit on the counter for 30 minutes or more and the colors wicked at different rates, breakin the brown into yellows and greens. Dooh!  It's a great chromatography experiment and maybe a bit like camouflage, but not cardboard colored.  I'll have to try again later!
firestar



 Robin gave each of the students a few extras to play with.  This is some firestar, a nylon fiber that shimmers.  I dyed it with red, orange and yellow.  It's pretty!  I also have some nylon ribbon that I dyed in the same colorway.  Yum!
Mohair/acrylic blend









This was a test dye job.  I have some leftover cones of acrylic/mohair yarn.  I wanted to see if they would take the dye.  They did!  The yellow in the center of the photo is the original color of the yarn.  The orange/red is the dyed mohair.  The black...well, that's dye from the dark blue sample I was trying to overdye.  Now I know that I can dye the mohair blend...and I should not trust the dark blue dye!


gradient in blues and greens


This last skein, also Cascade 220, was dyed twice.  In class I used green and blue green, a bit of yellow and a touch of light blue.  I also intentionally kept a section of the skein undyed.  After it came out of the dye pot, it looked awful!  There was such contrast between the deep greens and blue-greens and the natural yarn!  Yuck!

When I got home I set up a sun dye pot and added some dilute "brillant blue" and black.  The result was a lovely dusty blue on the natural section of the skein which is significantly less jarring that the natural was!

What a fun and informative class!  Many thanks to Robin and the folks at the White Violet Center!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Pretty! Thanks so much for posting your results. I love the way the last skein turned out - and I liked it after the first dyeing, too.

Erica said...

Sounds like a fun class! There really is no controlling dyeing; just when you think you've got it, the dyes go off and do something completely unexpected. That's half the fun of it, though. The colors are beautiful, if not what you were going for.