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Color questions
Color questions
Recently I visited my daughter in her new home. She has a lot of Navajo style rugs, some fairly worn and faded. I took some pictures with my iPhone. My experience is that Apple wants your pictures to look good more than be accurate, so it pops the color and contrast, even before you ask. The carpets don’t look so vivid in real life.
My experience with buying cotton yarn is that they want the colors, especially the red/yellow palate, to be vibrant. Compare the usual Navajo rug with the Colorado state flag. There isn’t much overlap in colors, especially saturation levels.
So how to de-saturate the colors?
The carpet pictures are below.
The yarn picture is below.
I chose the colors by matching as closely as possible using the color tool on Handweaving .net.
I’ve been mulling this over. Could you dye or bleach the fiber to make the palate more like the carpet? I do not relish the idea of dyeing anything because of the havoc it could create with its washing companions. Bleaching would present less of a problem. Would you bleach the cloth after weaving or bleach the thread before weaving? (As an aside, you could get a very interesting varigation by tipping a spool on its side so it was only partially covered by the coloring solution.)
Another possibility would be to introduce a lighter or darker companion thread. For instance, if you took a dark navy and paired it with a slightly paler blue, would it more resemble denim? If you wanted a duskier blue, if you paired a navy with a medium gray, would it look like the navy in the carpet?
Pair it you say? Here is my idea: You take a fine weave where you are doubling the ends. Rather than wind off a bobbin of color 1 and then draw off that bobbin along with the original spool to create a doubled end of color 1, you draw off spool 1, your base color and then tint it with a second color on the gray scale.
I am posting this question to a couple of groups, so some of you may see this request multiple times.
Thanks.
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1 Reply
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Hi Clif!
Overdyeing the yarn with a light gray tint probably won’t cause bleeding problems as long as you rinse out well. (I gave my ultra-paranoid-about-bleeding methods for rinsing in a different thread – don’t remember exactly which one but it was pretty recently.)
If you choose that route I would pick Neutral Gray fiber-reactive dye from Dharma as it is true gray AND a pure color so it won’t “break” (separate into other colors). Another possibility is Mist Gray, which isn’t very dark at their recommended concentration, so hard to overdo.
Bleach – a few things about bleach: first, you have to neutralize it or it will eat your cotton over time (ask me how I know!). Dharma sells a product called Bleach-Stop or I THINK you can also neutralize it using hydrogen peroxide but I’ve never done that. Do some googling and reading before you try it.
Second, test it on a small skein of yarn before you commit a larger quantity. Bleach typically doesn’t actually remove the part of the dye molecule that attaches to the yarn. Instead, it blows off part or all of the chromophore (the colored part). Some of them come off more easily than others, others don’t come off noticeably at all. And some turn baby poo green when you try to discharge them (I don’t recall exactly, but it was one of the fiber-reactive blues). Since you don’t know what it was dyed with, test first.
The idea of blending it with a gray yarn is intriguing. You would want to use a gray yarn of similar value, to maximize color blending. I once did something similar (unintentionally) by winding a cotton and a sillk yarn together and then dyeing. They took up dyes differently in the dyebath and I wound up with a mauve and dark gray yarn (the center quill in the attached photo). When I wove it with a black warp, the dark gray darkened the yarn, and I got some very nice optical mixing (second photo shows it woven on the loom). The difference was only visible close up – from a distance they appeared to be a single, slightly heathered color. (See the third photo – the leaves in the very middle.)
However, I was not starting with a super saturated color. The difference between brilliant orange and gray will likely (?) be more visible than the difference between brown (less saturated orange) and gray. So I would weave a test swatch to see if it works. You can do that on the end of another warp, just to see if the colors blend together without having to warp up with something totally new just to test.
And, again, I would use a gray similar in value (darkness) to the yarn you want to use. Lunatic Fringe carries a nice line of grays in different values – black, five grays, and white – and I think even has a small kit if you want just a little bit of each gray.
Let us know how it works out!
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