It is the long summer holidays here. And amidst the camping, BBQing, swimming and wilting in the heat, there is Summer School. The Summer School of which I speak is held every year at the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria. For a very modest sum, Guild experts hold workshops on weaving, dyeing and spinning.
I try to go to one workshop every year. This year I enrolled in Colour Mixing with Helen Bernisconi. Helen is primarily a rug weaver and dyes commercial carpet yarn for her work. She argues that in order to dye a range of colours, you do not need to buy seventy different shades, rather, learn to mix predictably from a set of primaries. So this colour mixing workshop focused on creating colours based within a trichromatic range using primary colours and black.
And here is the first complexity. Which blue, which red and which yellow to use? A long time ago, I bought a very useful book by Michael Wilcox called Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green (1987). Of course, artists and dyers will know all about this but I had never considered colours much until I read this book. Anyway, the basic point of the book is that are no true primary colours but rather versions of the primaries that leaned to another colour direction which you can see very clearly illustrated in the diagram below.
By combining primaries than leaned toward each other you get a clearer colour and by combining those leaning in opposite ways you get a murkier, sadder colour.
Our workshop used two sets of primaries (acid dyes in powder form from Gaywool, an Australian company based in Tasmania) mixed up into liquid stock solutions. Our A-range of colours included Nylosan Flavine, a greenish vivid yellow, Optilan Fast Red, an orange leaning red and Nylosan Turquoise, a green leaning blue. The B-range included Lanasyn Yelow F, a warm yellow, Nylosan Rhodamine, a fuscia red and Lanasyn Blue, a cobalt blue. They pretty much fit the distinctions you can see on the first primaries diagram above.
Essentially, with the trichromatic method, you are dyeing in a triangle, where the points are pure dyes of the primaries and the outsides are graduating ratios of two primaries and the middle of the triangle are graduating ratios of three primaries. A total of 10ml of dye was added to each bagged yarn sample. The amount of dye by ratio was in 2ml increments. Therefore, the pure yellow at the t0p of the triangle was 10ml of yellow. The colour to the top left was made with 8ml yellow and 2ml red. The colour to the right was made with 8ml yellow and 2ml blue.
It is complicated to explain. It was complicated on the day. Different primaries being mixed in different amounts by different people in very close proximity. My mission was the A-range. And it was accomplished, using a horrifying number of small ziplock bags which held the dye solution, vinegar, water and yarn.
The yarn I dyed at the workshop was a millspun Corridale yarn from Jarob Farm near Avoca, in Victoria. I had planned for my own handspun but realised a week prior to the workshop that this was actually not possible anymore. Fortunately, despite bushfires and heatwaves and very short notice, Jarob Farm saved me from myself.
All the dye baggies were then simmered till the water inside the bags was clear indicating all the dye had been taken up.
I still don’t really understand colour but I have a better sense of it now I think. Having done the workshop, I feel at least I have a method by which I could begin to create a colour range. This could be expanded by including half strength dyeing on white, and overdyeing on greys.
This type of predictive dyeing method coupled with a local yarn base and the KnitSonik system of generating colourwork motifs from your own personal environment would create a truly local textile response. The innovative KnitSonik system developed by Felicity Ford uses colour and shape analysis of source materials such as photographs of objects, buildings and landscapes to translate everyday things into a charted motif that can be knitted. It relies on a comprehensive yarn colour range which can be matched with great specificity to the source material. In the book, Felicity exclusively uses Jamieson and Smith yarns.
A colour range of yarn that reflects my place is what is missing for me to truly embrace the genius of the KnitSonik system. I feel like an Antipodean imposter expressing my icons and landscapes in Jamieson and Smith (as lovely as they are), yarns grown and dyed in the Shetland Islands of UK.
Lacking a local version of the wondrous range of Jamieson and Smith, after this workshop, I could theoretically dye my own range (it sounds easy if you say it fast). With my own yarn palette at my fingertips, my journey to the Yarn Side would be indeed be complete. Alas, I can see this would be the work of a lifetime, so perhaps I won’t start that tomorrow.
