Colour wheel and more dyeing

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front. Last weekend I exhausted myself with a marathon dyeing session. The reason for the dyeing was two activities for my C&G course. I had to dye a 6 section colour wheel. You were allowed to skip the activity if you had taken Level 2, where there must be a similar exercise or they encouraged those who had dyed one before to try a 12 section colour wheel. Well I’ve not done Level 2, but I have dyed a colour wheel before, so I thought it had better be a 12 section wheel. (I was going add a link here to a previous post but the first colour wheel seems to be pre-blog.) It was also a 12 section one, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. The oranges all looked the same, as did the purples. At the time I had only just started dyeing and didn’t have all the supplies/suppliers sussed. This time I have more experience and have worked out the best supplies. It turned out much better. Nice to be able to see that I have made progress.

Lying on each piece of fabric is a skein of crochet cotton that I dyed in with the fabric. I was quite sceptical as to whether it would work as it was obviously bleached as well as mercerised and “gasiert” (whatever that means – I’ve been unable to find out despite google). I washed it first in synthrapol. Whether that was necessary or not I don’t know, but the results were way beyond my expectations.

I also had to dye a larger piece of fabric using a pair of complementary colours in the dye bath. This was a repeat of an activity done previously with watercolour paints, to see that mixing complementary colours gave browns or greys. Well my watercolour attempts were pretty unsuccessful. The paints didn’t want to mix much at all. I was quite surprised as my niece had told me she didn’t get on with painting in watercolours, because everything ended up muddy. Well not for me – even when it was supposed too. My dyeing turned out much better. I tried two combinations – yellow/purple and red/green. The results of the yellow/purple were particularly pleasing.

For those who are interested, I was using Jacquard dyes: Fire Engine Red, Medium Blue and Lemon Yellow. The fabric was the cheapo 100% cotton from IKEA. It is not particularly a fine weave but it is perfectly ok for the stuff I’m doing and it’s an unbeatable price of 2 Euro a meter and 150cm wide.