Elune color way Golden Yellow/Bright Orange/Celadon
Approx pattern thread needs 135 - will make up 140gms + 40gms extra celadon thread
This color way I wanted to make in the spring, based on a murky looking sunrise I caught in March this year that looked like a big yellow/orange egg yolk in a misty blue/green sky.
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| Dharma Celadon 157 Contains Turquoise |
I tried and tried to get this color with my jacquard aquamarine by diluting it and mixing in some more blue and warm black, but they all came out too black or too green so I ditched it until I was able to order Celadon from Dharma. I did write them a note asking when it would be back in stock just looking for a possible eta, they said they did not have one as of yet but within a couple of weeks it was back to being available. I don't know if that was just for me lol but I will take it as a sign that Dharma is a great place to get dyes from.
I decided to go with Jacquard Golden yellow and Bright Orange and Dharma Celadon to try out a 3 color experiment instead of just mixing some golden yellow with bright orange as per the picture above. Elune is a big enough pattern that it will hopefully showcase the 3 colors nicely, but based on the wash out so far I may end up cutting out a bunch of that orange, its taking up a lot of space.
Based on some less than stellar experiences with 3 color pour on this spring I decided to try my hand on splitting up a skein into 2 smaller skeins to dye half of each color, 1st skein gets half dyed golden yellow and half dyed bright orange, 2nd skein gets dyed half orange and half celadon. Hopefully this will create longer color change ways as the colors are not so crowded, and its easier to estimate half a skein than 1/3 a skein.
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| 3 color pour on, on one single ball left little room for color transition |
I also decided I would test 2 different pour on methods to see the difference, the first is my most recent method of pouring the 1st color on, wrapping it up tight then loose and pouring on the 2nd color. The second method was to pour on the first color, let it batch then re-wrap it and do the 2nd color the next day, hoping that giving the 1st color more time to absorb and penetrate the ball would result in more color mixing when the 2nd color is poured on the next day.
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| Previous dye job using 2 balls, one ball in golden yellow/carmine red and second ball in carmine red/navy allowing for lost of color transition room |
Doing it this way also allowed me to see how the Celadon and orange would play together, being a blue/green color Celadon is not likely to play nice with orange and come out with some brown/muddy results. So by doing the 2nd method and dyeing the balls with yellow and orange first, if the Celadon/orange ball in the 1st method didn't pan out I could maybe mix up some Carmine red for the 2nd method instead for a nice yellow/orange/red colorway.
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| Method 1 initial rinse out Celadon/Orange |
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| Method 1 initial rinse out orange and golden yellow |
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| Rinsed and dried extra Celadon skein |
I'm happy to say though that the Celadon/Orange mix has actually worked out pretty nice! There's some muddy look to the transition but its not too much, its also really worked well for the transition of colors I think it looks good.
Unfortunately I must not have been in my right mind when I started doing my 2nd method because I ended up doing it backwards. The way to do it is to wrap up half the ball tight and then wrap the other half up loose to get a nice even pour with the first color. Unfortunately what I did was wrapped it up loose 1st and poured on the 1st color, then wrapped up tight. This is making the 1st color start to penetrate quite far through the ball but hey I won't know how I feel about it till the final rinse and dry later this week, so stay tuned for that.
But the 1st method of pouring on one color on top of each other all at once seems to have worked out well, although as I said I may end up cutting out a large portion of the bright orange since that's quite a lot of orange. After running out of thread on a couple of patterns I decided to think ahead and dye up some extra thread in just Celadon in case I ran out at the end of the pattern, so I can make up from there I hope.
I would have liked to see more golden yellow but it seems to have mixed nicely with the slightly diluted orange, maybe next time I will stick with an orange/yellow mix entirely, that bright orange is reaallly bright. The Celadon actually ended up being too dark for what I wanted at first and I had to double my water to dilute it to what i hoped would be the color I wanted, which it was!
In the past I estimated how much of the thread I would be dying in that color, so for this example I was dyeing a 70gm ball in golden yellow and orange, so I would make up 35ml dye stock for each color as that is half of 70gms. But I found that I was left with more streaking and white spots by being so exacting so this time I mixed up 70ml dye stock in each color for the full weight of the ball to try and use up as much as possible to really penetrate and soak in past the resist of the ball.
Dye amounts;
4* 70 gms skeins for 2 experiments, 2 balls per experiment to be divided up between colors, 1 ball yellow/orange and 1 ball orange/celadon. + 40gms extra skein of Celadon only just in case.
Golden Yellow, 2*70gm balls = 140gms = 140ml dyestock needed
140ml*5% DOS = 7gms [I went for 5gms because that's all I had left] = 1tsp
Bright Orange, 4*70gms balls = 280gms = 280ml dyestock needed
280*2% DOS [tried to reduce how bright it was, more or less lol] = 5.6gms = 1tsp
Celadon, 2 70gms balls plus 40gms extra = 180gms = 180ml
180ml*5%DOS = 9gms = 2tsp [however, when I opened the jar I saw how dark the dye looked and I wondered if 2tsp was too much so I started with 1tsp/5gms instead and boy was I glad I did because that was waaayyyy tooo dark for what I was going for. In the end I doubled the water on even that shade up to 360ml to dilute it, even knowing how colors often rinse and dry much lighter that's what I was going for]
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| Test color swatches on paper towels, golden yellow, orange and celadon after diluting |
If ever you buy fiber reactive dye from Dharma, they have a handy tool on their site, a dye yield estimator, this can help you do more accurate dyestock estimates because it is taking into account their actual DOS as per their products vs how much dye powder is needed to achieve it. Note, this tool is for Vat dyeing or full immersion dyeing not painted or pour on dye like this method, that may be the reason the dye still came out darker than the color I wanted. I will have to test that theory out some other time to see the difference. In any case for now it seems that 5gms is what the calculator would recommend for dyeing 180gms fiber as well, but just the method may have tweaked the color result.
Dharma Procion Dye Estimator Calculator
A note on Dahrma dye, they look like very high quality dyes, not saying Jaqcaurd isn't, it's just that the dye particles look much finer vs jacquard, this may be due to the dye being fresher having not sat on an art supply shelf for a few years, still happy with the colors in either brand though.
The extra skein that I dyed up came out a bit darker than the color on the orange/Celadon skein, probably because I soaked that sucker in everything I had left of the dye to use it up lol, but darker at the end is better than lighter at the end, so far so good.
Now all I have to do is wait for the dry out and work it up to see how this looks!
The 2nd experiment had gone pear shaped from the beginning, see above, but I was actually happy with how it turned out and maybe learned a few things too, but again will have to wait and see the difference between how it works up on the doily itself.
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| Method 2 initial rinse out orange and yellow |
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| Method 2 initial rinse out orange and Celadon |
However I think in the future in this 2nd method I will start to tweak my pour on sequence, dark color first, lighter or brighter color second. Pouring on the celadon over top the of the orange really seemed to darken up the orange in this method, that may also be because I let it sit in the dye for a bit as well. Pouring the orange over the yellow didn't darken up the yellow too much but it did take up lots of room and came out very bright, again might be because I let it sit in the orange dye as well, must learn to be more consistent!
I just find that the second color that gets poured on in the 2nd split batch method ends up taking up more room, but mixes very nicely with the the color. This is good though if I want to make a good estimate between the middle and ending color. So for example the orange yellow ball, the orange took up more room than the yellow, but in the Celadon and orange ball the Celadon took up more room allowing for more of its color to show which is good for that color as it will be at the end of the doily as the doily gets bigger and eats up more thread, this may present a more balanced looking color transition once worked up, but again will have to wait and see how it all works out.
But in my usual all at once method I may in the future have done the color combo a bit differently, the orange/yellow ball I would have poured the orange on first and the yellow on second, and for the orange/celadon ball I would do orange first and celadon second.
Again all this will have to wait till the doily is worked up to see how it all works out in the end.
Whoohoo! I am almost finished a doily with the method 1 pour on all at once thread and I am super happy with not only how the colors turned out but how well it has worked on the Elune pattern itself. I cut out about 12gms of the first ball at the end of the orange bit and continued on with the next ball, I had actually gotten all the way up to the round 49 where the edge is finished on the petals but I wanted to start those with the transition into Celadon color, so I cut out that bit of extra orange from ball 1 and that seems to have done the trick!
Okay folks here she is!
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| Pattern Elune by Irina Maleeva |
The second test balls came out with much more saturated colors, probably because I let them soak in the 2nd colors so I think I'm going to ball those up and keep the separated for another project, still happy with how both colors came out though!
