Paint Swatch Dyeing #1: Hearts Desire

Back in October of 2021, I wanted to make trick or treat bags for my kids, but I was having a hard time finding yarn that I wanted. I knew I wanted a speckled yarn with some black and orange in earthy tones, but I never found what I was looking for. I ended up settling for some acrylic yarn from my stash and I love them, but I wondered endlessly if I could have dyed that yarn myself.

I started watching yarn dyeing videos on Youtube, and in February of 2022, I finally decided to bite the bullet and get my hands dirty with dyeing.

I ended up buying the Chemknits course through Knitcrate. I ended up doing the dye triangle exercise where you make 15 different colors using a primary red, blue and yellow.

A core memory was unlocked while doing this exercise because I remembered an assignment I had in my Children in Art class during my second year of college. We had to reach into a bag and pull out 4 paint swatches. Then we had to create those colors using only red, blue, yellow. black and white tempera paint to create a complete color match.

The idea was that you would use the primary colors to create your base color and then use black and white to either lighten or shade your color. Our professor decided the best way to teach this would be to call a student to the front and have the rest of the class coach while the student explained each move they made while color mixing. I was the student who got to mix the color while 15 classmates tried to explain what colors they saw in a terra cotta brown paint swatch.

It was so much fun. So much fun that I decided I was going to try it with dye. Off to Home Depot I went to raid their paint swatches. A few weeks later, my mini skeins arrived from Wool 2 Dye 4 and I was off.

I ended up pulling the PPG color. I knew this was obviously going to be a red base, but it was not solely red or even a lightened red. After staring for a bit, I decided it definitely wasn't orange leaning, so I was going to add a small amount of blue to give it a slight purple lean.

I mixed a 1% dye stock of Jacquard Fire Red and a 1% dye stock of Jacquard Brilliant blue. My base solution ended up being 5 parts red to 1 part blue. For this exact color matching, I mixed 1o mL of red dye stock with 2 mL blue dyestock. In order to make the deepest color (Hearts Desire), I the diluted the 12 mL of dye stock with 480 mL of water.

I then diluted that dye to create the further colors. For Cherry Pink, I used 100 mL of Hearts Desire (HD) mixed with 100 mL water. Razzberries I used 50 mL HD with 100 mL of water. Brandywine was 50mL HD with 200 mL of water. Rose Melody was 25 mL HD with 200 mL water. Cradle Pink was 12.5 mL HD with 200 mL water, and Ballerina was 6.25 mL HD with 200 mL water.

I seriously had so much fun making this gradient, and I learned so much about dyeing with this activity. Not to mention, that dye stock has gone SO FAR. If there is a paint color you would like me to try to match, drop it in the comments below.

-Abby

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