I’ve been making red-orange yarn this week. According to my dye book, it has been over a year since I did any dyeing and I’ve enjoyed being back in the dye studio* a great deal. I’m dyeing some yarn for a friend. She might be the only person on the planet who I’d do this for, though no one else has tested it yet. I’m trying to match a naturally dyed yarn that she needs a lot of. Because it is so hard to replicate naturally dyed colors (and she is a master dyer of natural dyes), she asked me to make her this color using synthetic dyes. I can replicate colors without much difficulty and I have a great big pot that I can dye the whole lot at once. I think it will be about four pounds of fiber.
The color is red-orange. I’m pretty happy that I did a lot of sampling of oranges several years ago when I was working on a commission because I learned a lot about orange. I struggled to make it back then, but this time around I felt inundated with options. There are so many ways to make orange just in my small selection of primary dye colors. I am only using two yellows (warm and cool), but I have a pile of reds. I mostly limit the dyes I use and prefer to make secondary and tertiary colors from red, yellow, and blue. But I do end up using a warm and a cool version of yellow and blue. And for red? I have four reds I use regularly and another five or so that I sometimes try out when I can’t get what I want with the first four. Red is tricky.
Attempts to match a naturally dyed red-orange with a synthetically dyed version.
The color I’m trying to match is lying across the sample skeins in the image above. What I’m struggling with beyond the color is the particular feeling that the naturally dyed skein has. Part of the difference is that I’ve so far been testing the formulas on a different yarn before going to the final yarn, the amount of which is limited. But the base yarn my friend is using has a decidedly pink undertone which means I do have to do a final round of samples on that yarn. I believe she also dyed the initial yarn in two batches. It was yellow (goldenrod I think) overdyed with cochineal. The depth of color when you layer is so beautiful. But it isn’t practical for me to overdye this batch because there is so much of it and if I mess it up, there is no second chance. Sometimes a more complex dye formula will give me that depth of color I’m looking for that better replicates natural dyes, sometimes not. I think I’ve come close.
The final samples on the final yarn are in the dye pot now. We’ll know tomorrow morning.
Dye samples drying.
I believe in sampling. I think a good dyer has to love sampling. There is no sense dyeing a pound of fiber if the color is going to be wrong. So I use 30 gram samples in quart jars to look at color. It works well for everything but very light colors with lots of dyes mixed together.** But I will admit that sampling can become additive and sometimes by the time I’ve spent four or five days sampling for color, I’ve lost interest in dyeing the actual yarn.*** Fortunately, this is just one color and it (fingers crossed) only took three days of sampling. Admittedly that was because I needed the yarns to dry to see the final color before trying another combination. I could have dyed all these samples easily in one day.
Dye samples—comparing to the original naturally dyed skein. At least one of those skeins (the hot pink one top right) was a flat out error. I conflated the amounts of yellow and red in the formula. A few others were fairly far from the mark. Most were close. A few seemed right on.
Orange is a cheerful color. It has never been high on my list of preferred colors, but I might change my mind after this week.
Excuse me. I’m off to retie 20 skeins of yarn in the hopes that one of the final three samples is the answer and I can dye the whole pot tomorrow. After that I have some dyeing of my own to do. There is a big tapestry looming in my mind and the colors are becoming clear. I’m thinking one may be red-orange.
*My dye studio is my garage. I like to call it my dye studio to make me feel like it is an actual dedicated dye studio, but it is not. The car has to be put outside at the mercy of Colorado summer hailstorms, other projects must be moved out of the way, and a garden hose is run from an outside valve. And for hot water, there is my bathtub. You go with what you’ve got.
**Because you can’t measure accurately anything smaller than a couple milliliters of dye solution and then you have to start mixing weaker solutions and at some point it just isn’t worth it to me… I’d rather just dye a larger skein and overdye it later if I don’t like it.
***Also after four or five days my back is not happy with the thought of more days of even heavier dye pots.