Collection: Color Theory Club

I did not plan on doing a yarn club this year, but sometimes interests collide, and it's easier to do something you want to do if it serves another purpose. So here we are!

Way back in the middle of 2021, Covid-19 was causing supply chain issues that were affecting the blends my suppliers were able to make. Some dye colors were completely unavailable with no restock date in sight. Others had been reformulated, but no longer appeared the same in powder form or when mixed, and no longer yielded the same results as previously. This was infinitely frustrating, as consistency and repeatability are really important to me.

I was wanting to figure out some sort of solution, and stumbled upon triad dyeing, meaning dyeing using only the primary colors: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. It's not really complicated stuff, just basic color theory and a little math. I started experimenting, and got as far as dyeing 11 colors made with just Cyan and Yellow. I remember that I found process kind of frustrating; I was using 10g mini skeins, which meant I was working with such small quantities of dye powder that my scale had a hard time. What's the point of undertaking such a task if you can't be accurate? I thought that maybe I should just scale things up: dye more yarn in order to be able to use larger quantities of dye powder. But dyeing full skeins for myself wasn't practical, and starting up another club wasn't something I could take on at the time, so I put a pin in it.

Now, nearly two years later,  inconsistency in dye powders does not seem to be getting any better. My last order from one of my suppliers had at least 6 dyes that appeared differently than their previous formulation.