Procion MX overdye results - part 2 - Excel-ish

So this may look complicated, but it isn't really. Column A represents the family of the base color, red, yellow, orange, etc. Columns B though H below represent the overdyes used: teal, dirty green, gold, pink, blue, purple and indigo. The check marks represent the overdyed colors I liked enough to want to explore further. This was a somewhat depressingly small pile compared to the mountain of originals! But I was very picky. A lot of the colors were perfectly nice, just not "wow".

The first check mark below in cell B2 is a red base color overdyed with teal; the second check mark in cell B3 is an orange base color overdyed with teal; the third check mark in cell B4 is a yellow base overdyed with teal, etc. etc. Each base color had been washed out fully and then re-soda soaked, so the results don't reflect wet colors mixing, but a true overdye of a previously completed dye job, utilizing the transparency of Procion MX dyes to create interesting new colors.

According to color theory, red and yellow and blue make brown. Some browns are delightful. Some are not. The more you overdye, the more chance of sludge, or the technical term, "ick". However, color is a very subjective thing, and the colors that stood out for me in this exercise might not appeal to others. Disclaimer: I am not fond of plum and I am very fond of blues and teals. This probably skewed my results below.

Teal overdye results
Teal is a mixture of yellow and turquoise. As expected, where the teal overdye hits a base color with a high proportion of red, ick ensues. Very few red and orange colors made the cut below. Yellows also pushed the teal too far to green for my taste. Pinks and purples, being made up of less red, created some pleasant colors. Lots of analogous hits. 

Teal overdye

Dirty green overdye results
The results were a complete surprise. I did not expect to have so many hits with red with a green overdye, but I had forgotten that this green had no blue in it. It was a yellow/black mixture. No blue meant no ick.

Green overdye

 Gold overdye results
Clearly the gold did not play nice with the greens, or else I only like a very specific kind of bright happy green, not so much the sludgy/khaki/camo. The gold had red in it. Go figure!

Gold overdye

 Pink overdye results
The pink was heavily diluted and so often failed to make much impact on the reds or purples and it was quite unpleasant with the browns. Pink is a watered down version of red and yellow so very limited green hits below as might be expected. My grey had green in it, so more ick ensued with pink overdye there too.

Pink overdye

Blue overdye results
Blues are real team players. Probably the best range of good results across the other colors. This was a pure color overdye, so nothing to split, unlike all the others. And such good across the board results, hmmm. Something to ponder there. More experimentation required!

Blue overdye

 Plum overdye results
Well goodbye yellow! And brown..And green...The plum was a mixture of red and blue, so any base color with a large proportion of yellow in the mix tipped it right into ick territory. Lots of positive orange results where the concentration of yellow wasn't so strong.

Plum overdye

Indigo overdye results
Again, indigo is a blue/red mixture, so the yellows don't play nice, but the oranges are not too bad, and the depth of the indigo makes it stand out well against the blues.

Indigo overdye

Excel is a hugely powerful program, great for tracking and analyzing dye experiments. Maybe in the future I will do a post on using Excel. 

In the next post I will show some fabric samples and try to draw some conclusions.