What A Colorful World!….Aug. 3, 2005

Color is something that never ceases to interest me.  Whether it is a trip out to the yard to look at the flowers in the garden, the incredible overload of color that visits us here in the autumn in NH, or just the subtle colors of the weeds and geese against the pond that they reside in, across the way from my house.  I love it all!  I can honestly say that there really isn’t a color that I dislike (well maybe pink…..but sometimes I even like that when it is combined with another color)

Last week, after I said good bye to the last little bunny baby, I headed over to Denmark, ME, for a dyeing seminar that I had signed up for.  This was the second of a 2 part seminar, put on by Linda Whiting of Pinestar Studio .  Linda has been a student of color for many years and put together a wonderful class for those of us who attended.

After we listened to some general information and some sensible safety tips, we set about the business of dyeing.  We were given 3 colors each to work with.  Red, yellow and blue…….from these colors, Linda had given us different combinations of the 3 colors to work with and as you can see above, we were able to make a complete color wheel with just these 3 colors. 

As a girl who dyes quite frequently, it was fascinating for me to see
that with only 3 colors, I actually had the capability to make 66 colors from just red, yellow and blue.  If you look at the triangle to the right, those numbers are meaningful.  Yellow being at the top, tells you for example that 730, means 7 parts of yellow, 3 parts of red and 0 parts of blue will give you this color.  What fun!!!!

This next picture is the yarn that we dyed to the colorwheel.  After we nuked them for a few seconds in the microwave, we wrapped them in plastic wrap and then put our complete color wheel bundles into a bigger plastic bag, which was then put into
a pot on the stove to be steamed.  Here Linda has a few cups in the pan, with a cake rack resting on them, so that the little bags of fiber were not sitting in the water.  To the right, you can see Linda looking over our samples.  As you can see, there is a wonderful range of colors that were made from just those 3 basic colors.

From the first exercise, we moved onto the next one, which was Gradient colors.  Here we took one color, mixed full strength at a 1% solution and then diluted it by half and by half again, again and again.  You can see the various depths of shade in the cups being steamed as well as in the picture of Linda with the yarns.  Again……quite fascinating.

From there we moved to mixing complementary colors, analogous and finally triad combinations and watching how the color shifts with just a little color added from one of the other one.  This was my favorite part.  Taking 2 colors from the opposite sides of the color wheels and combining them in different percentages from the outside (each color on one end) to the middle and seeing what color range you got, was just mind boggling and so fun!

At the end of the class, we had a number of samples to take home and a good list of reading material. 

This morning as I was reading a few blogs with my morning coffee, Cassie directed us to Sara Lamb’s website, which in itself is very interesting.  Sara had a link in her post to Elaine Benfatto’s website, which given the class that I had just taken was so timely.  There is wonderful information on Elaine’s site.  I got lost in it this morning.  Tomorrow, I will take another trip to Sara’s to read more about her weavings and her usage of color.  She is such a talented fiber artist!

Pro Chem, in Massachusetts offers weekend classes very similar, but in much more depth to the classes that I have taken with Linda.  I hope to take one of them this winter. It is all so fascinating!