Its been pouring down rain here in Austin Texas today (who doesn't have to water the garden? THIS GIRL!) So I thought I would talk a bit about a topic I touched on several posts ago, they dyers color book. What is it, how is it useful, and do I really have time to keep track of colors, or do I just want to have fun with them?
First off, this will all be based upon my Color Book, which I only started keeping when I wanted to move from dyeing for personal use to selling my products, and even then it took me a while to get into the habit of doing it, so some color ways from my early days are lost to me now.
I think if you are going to be dyeing for personal use only, then there is no real reason to keep up a full fledged book unless you really like keeping records, but there are some exercises you may want to try that I will talk about in another post. Even as a personal use dyer however, it could be fun to be able to look back as use past work as inspiration to work from.
You can use anything you want as a dyers color book, I know a 3 page binder would be useful, especially if it had page protectors in it to keep dye off the paper as you are working. I used what I had on hand though, which is a small notebook I got as a gift from work, spiral bound and lined. This is what it looks like on the outside.I keep track of several things when I am dyeing experimentally to come up with a new color way, and use the notes like a recipe when I want to recreate that color. Your color book is equivalent to a fiber cookbook. First, I keep track of the # of grams of solution, what percentage it is, what color and color # I have assigned to it, how much yard was used with that amount of solution, as well as the steps I took to achieve the colors, and what dye method I used.
For example, lets take a roving of 100g and pretend we are dyeing it. Lets say I want to use use pink and yellow to make orange, but I want it to be a semi solid, so more pink it some places, more yellow in others, and orange in between. I can do this several ways, so if I am coming up with a new color way, I may try both, which means I'll need 2 pages in my book. For ease of math, lets assume we are dyeing at a standard 1% solution. I know that for each method I will want to use about half and half so I can do 50g yellow 50 g pink and it will give me a nice orange color, and then I can paint it on and let the colors blend, try dyeing it in a vat mixing at different times, etc. Once the fiber is done, I let it dry and then paste a sample of it into the book next to my recipe. I also make notes about the final colors, especially for roving and top samples. Here is what that might look like. The color on top, the sample of fiber pasted in, and the process below. Below all that is my notes on the finished product. I always leave a bit of space at the very top incase I end up naming the color way, so I can write that in for later as well.Any color book should be customizable, so feel free to note anything you think you might need later!
Hope you enjoyed this installment!
Brittany