Dyeing a gradient with Procion MX

Lots of dyeing = little blogging!

The chemist has been tie/ice-dyeing her heart out. So nice when you can go home and leave the washout to someone else..On the other hand it is wonderful to mix dyes and have someone to hand you clean utensils all the time! She took all the pics on her phone, so I will have to browbeat ask her to do a guest post some time. It is so interesting the difference between us. She is all about the folds and I am all about the color!

Lemon//Grape gradient

Here is a gradient I dyed with lemon yellow and grape, both pure colors. It is magical to see how the ambers and browns emerge in the middle of the range. None of these are colors I particularly want to reproduce, but is was good to see what happens.

To dye a gradient figure out how much total dye you will use for each piece of fabric, based on the weight of the fabric. See Paula Burch's invaluable site for information. For convenience let's say 60ml total. Determine how many steps you want in your gradient. Divide 60ml in half, 30ml, and that's your midpoint where you are adding equal quantities of each color. Parse out the rest of the graduations based on how big a color step you want. You also now have a recipe for each step. 

If you liked any one of these colors, but didn't like the range, you could now try adding black or water to the recipe for the color you liked to make tints and shades. I like to use a bigger gradient normally, as I am interested in where the color starts to change. Sometimes it takes several steps, but with some of the stronger colors even a touch of the second color pushes the first color in a whole new direction. Infinite possibilites, so little time! Of course when making a shade with black, the black you use will influence the color. There is a good exploration of the undertone of blacks here.

Here is an example of a ratio creating a 7 step gradient, with 5 mixed and 2 pure samples.L is lemon yellow and G is pure Grape. Each time you are changing the ratio by 10ml or 1/6. 

60L
50L:10G
40L:20G
30L:30G
20L:40G
10L:50G
60G