project code, for future reference: g&s-601-620-624-t5-v1
since i'm planning a 'do you love the color of the sky?' scarf, and need to dye some wool accordingly, and am being a responsible dyer, i spent my weekend dyeing up a color triangle.
STEP 1: locate your dyes
i'm using g&s 601 (yellow), 620 (fuchsia), and 624 (turquoise). for acid, i used white vinegar.
STEP 2: plan your triangle
i decided to go for a 15-piece triangle (5 by 5, i guess? although it's an equilateral triangle so who knows). each bundle of wool will be dyed at 1% (10 mL stock solution = 0.1 g dye, ratio to 10 g fiber), with varying percentages of turquoise, fuchsia, and yellow (in increments of 25%).
STEP 3: make mini wool bundles
i separated 1.5 skeins (?) of knitpicks stroll roving into 10 g bundles. to do this, i divided the 100 g skein into 8, then stripped and redistributed until i had bundles of 10 g each.
little bit janky, but it works, and that's what matters, right?
STEP 4: mix stock solutions
y'all don't get pictures of this because i was busy leaning into the mad science aesthetic with mask + goggles + coat + gloves + most importantly, no phones.
the original plan was to do 1% stock solutions (1 g of dye in 100 mL water). that was the plan until i mixed up my measurements and added 1 cup to my stock instead of to my dyebaths. for various reasons -- a) i was too lazy to multiply quantities by 2.5, and b) there was no way i was getting granularities smaller than 0.5 mL with the equipment i have -- i switched course and added 300 mL (total) water to each stock solution, thereby attaining 0.33% stock solutions.
(i can feel all my science teachers of years past glaring holes into my brain. i was gonna just say 'chemistry profs', but then i realized even my middle school general science teachers are probably crying right now.)
STEP 5: form the triangle
i filled 15 containers with 1 cup of water each. then, i added dye to each cup, according to the triangle plan diagram above (tripled from the earlier diagram to make up for the accidental dilution situation).
STEP 6: add the wool
added the wool to the cold dyebaths. pretty self-explanatory.
STEP 7: set the dye
added 1 tsp vinegar to each bath and stirred. then, i set it all by cooking the jars bain-marie style for 20 minutes.
i heated them in groups of 2-4 because i only had 4 jars. and then 3, because i shattered one by shocking it in cold water. oops.
numbering each sample from 1-15, going from top to bottom and left to right (per the rl images, not the diagrams that i'm too lazy to fix), the groups were as follows:
1, 8, 11, 15
2, 6, 9
3, 5, 7
4, 10, 13
12, 14
i grouped them so that similar colors would be separate and i would be able to tell them apart later.
anyways, after the water ran (mostly) clear, i washed them and left them to air dry.
i'm planning to spin a few samples to keep, and then make the rest into a gradient yarn or something.
based on this experiment, i'm going to try dyeing a few more 10 g samples with attempts at formulas for the colors of the sky. we'll see how that goes...
George Field. Diagrams of the Universal Harmony of Colours, The Correlation of Primary Colours, Primary Colour Harmonies, Secondary Colour Harmonies, and Tertiary Colour Harmonies. Hand-Coloured Wood-Engravings for Chromatics. 1817.
