New Dyes!

photo 3Last night was my first adventure into Procion Dyes.  I’ve been excited to try these (new to me) dyes that will give me brighter and bolder colors, but I have been trying to restrain myself until I felt like I had other things organized around the thread dyeing, (a proper dyeing space, a organized system for keeping all my threads straight both before and after they’ve been dye, a better system for labeling my threads, a way of tracking dye lots, etc…)  I can’t say that I’ve gotten everything figured out, but I had some custom requests for colors I just couldn’t do with my set of over-the-counter basic dyes so I decided it was time to pull out the Procion and soda ash and starting doing some more serious dye-chemistry.

Here’s the extent of what I played around with.  Not much, I know, but it’s a start.  The bright yellow and the dark blue were the color requests.  The blue and purple variegates were just me playing around with mixing dyes.

I bought another 7 cones of thread that arrived last week, so I’ll be focused in the next two weeks on winding those up.  After last night’s success, I’m also ordering a fuller set of colors in the new dyes.  By the time the threads are ready to go I’ll be playing around with the new colors.

I’m not going to switch over completely, I still really like the soft blends I’m getting with my original dyes, but I’ll probably be a little more hesitant about restocking the lesser used colors when I run out of them.  Over time I’ll get better with the Procions and I think I’ll be able to repeat those soft blends as well.

 

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