Dyeing Silk vs Cotton

Results of my morning

I spent a few minutes this morning dyeing some yarn I recently bought at Dharma Trading when I was up in the Bay Area.   Eventually I will run out of my favorite 'thin' tapestry yarn and will have to replace it with something else.  So while at Dharma I selected three candidates. a 100% noil silk, a 50/50 cotton/silk blend and a 100% pima cotton.   And this morning I thought I would test how each takes the dye.

For our guild's color wheel project one of my colors is green so I have been collecting various green yarns to do something in green.  Today seemed a great opportunity to add to my green collection as well as test out the new yarn.  I found an old Createx liquid dye called Emerald Green and decided to try that out.  Here are the results:

100% Silk on left, 100% cotton in middle, 50/50 blend on right.

 As you can see, the three skeins are slightly different colors. But they are definitely green. They were all in the same dye pot for the same amount of time.  I always find it fascinating to see how the nature of the fiber makes a difference in the resulting color.

Next I wanted to try something called Paris green.  As I mixed it up I tested it and the color was way too blue so I added a bit of yellow to bring it back to the green side of blue.   But from the results below you can tell I didn't add enough yellow to shift it to green.   Again most interesting to see the colors resulting from three different fiber blends in the same dye pot.

100% Silk on left, 100% cotton in middle, 50/50 blend on right. 

And here is the Paris green with a lot more yellow added with a resulting color which fall within my 'green' category.  On my computer screen the one on the right looks a bit blue but in real life it tends more to green. 

100% Silk on left, 100% cotton in middle,50/50 blend on right.

And now I think I have quite enough green yarn for a 4 by 10 inch tapestry!