A short hiatus. I went on holiday - and flooded Instagram with photos of Norfolk skies and tide lines and sunsets - and then lost three days of studio time, waiting for dye supplies to arrive. I wish I could say I made good use of the lost time but it seems I don't respond well to my plans being thwarted!
However, I've been making maximum use of studio time since to progress this colour study. At any one time, there has been one batch of cloth in rinse buckets and another batch sitting in dye, while I'm trimming and sticking swatches into my dye books. I'm now about half way through and am starting to see results.
The aim of the exercise is to explore over dyeing of complementary colours - which should yield some neutrals. There are some good, rich browns but overall I seem to be getting a bias towards green. I think this is because I have increased the strength of the yellow and blue dyes to stand up better to the red. I've decided to stick with this for the remainder of the exercise to maintain consistency of the results. Of course it helps that I like green - if I was getting loads of purple, I would probably be changing the recipe. I think it is interesting in itself to see how I can influence the colour by doing this.
My dye book is starting to look exciting. It's worth remembering that the product of this exercise will be the sample swatches in this book. All the dyed cloth is simply a by-product. Albeit one that will leave me with a glorious range of colours to use as needed. Although people who love bright colours would probably weep to see me turn them into sludgy browns and greens ...