2Dye4 Tuesday: Sample Skeins with Acid Dyes

So it's been a week since I last posted. This is mainly due to the fact that starting Tuesday afternoon I had a three day migraine. Subsequently, there was very little to no knitting at all last week. Hence, the lack of posts. This weekend I was feeling better and earlier in the week I got my commercial acid dyes in the mail.

I ordered the ProWashFast Acid Dye from Pro Chemical and Dye. I decided to start with their primary colors and as I was doing my research I learned that they have two different sets of primary colors. The "warm" primaries and the "cool" primaries. I ended up buying the sample kit for both sets thinking that this would provide me with more versatility to mix my own colors. I also got a color card with small samples of all of the dye colors on yarn attached.

With these I had a good idea of what all of the primaries looked like on yarn but I wanted to do some test skeins combining the colors to create the secondary and tertiary colors on the color wheel for reference. 

I started by taking some 100g skeins and breaking them up into 15g (approx. 70 yard) mini skeins. These were all dyed using an immersion method in mason jars heather in the microwave to set the dye. 

Here I am getting them ready for dyeing by placing in the acidic pre-soak solution. In case you are wondering, I don't have my dust mask on in these photos, as I haven't actually opened any of the dye powders yet. I followed all of the appropriate safety precautions. 

Obviously I have done a whole lot of these (25 so far) and I have 11 more to go. Basically for each of the possible combinations of 2 of my 6 primary colors I am dyeing 3 skeins. For instance I use Magenta and Sun Yellow, the three resulting skeins are examples of the different mixes available based on a 25/75, 50/50, and 75/25 ratio of the two colors in the final dye solutions. 

I know all of this is really technical, and rather time consuming but it has enabled me to get an amazing range of color with only six different colors from the manufacturer. This hopefully will save me from having to buy all 100 plus colors that they offer to get the variety of color I crave. 

The tags attached to them have no real meaning they just have a number associated with a stat sheet that has all of the information I need to recreate that shade in the future. 

Some of the colors are very similar but there are subtle differences in all of them that are not easily captured on camera. 

After I finish the last of these maybe I'll play with different depths of shades and see what kinds of interesting effects I can achieve with varying strengths of dye solution. So many good things to come!