Blue Stuff

It's not really a secret that my favorite color is blue, is it?  Didn't think so.  I'm friends with every blue there is, but my favorite is a certain muted tone of light greeny-gray-blue, like this:

(In fact, I have an entire board on Pinterest dedicaeted to blue)

I'm really into Vikings lately, and I have some older garb that has really seen it's day; I've been planning to rebuild one of my old cotehardies into a new Viking hangerok or smokr apron dress.  The fabric is "Emerald" linen from Fabric-Store.com, and I thought I'd pair it with a new under-dress in my favorite blue.  I'm also really into dyeing fabric more and more these days - it's so fun!  I've done colors straight from the bottle; but I recently found Rit's Color Library guides on their website - really handy stuff - and so I thought I'd give custom color-mixing a try.

To wit:

Based on my perusal of Rit's various color mixing charts and guides online, I purchased a bottle of "Evening Blue" and a bottle of "Apple Green", and went to town.  The mixtures are labeled on the photo above.  I did two dye baths, to see the difference between using salt vs. vinegar in the mixture as a fixative;  I normally use both at once, so at the end of the experiment, I mixed them together and gave it a whirl, and then transferred the mixture into a metal bowl just for kicks, to see if there's really that much difference.  (There is. The entire rest of the experiment was done in glass containers).

It's not very scientific, I was just playing around.  None of the colors are exactly what I was looking for; but "C" in the upper left corner is pretty dang close.  This coming weekend I'm planning to cut up the samples and over-dye them with coffee grounds and with tea, to see if I can shade and warm up the tones just a tad, to get the blues exactly where I want them.

In the meantime, I now have the following:

• some experience in color mixing,
• a handy-dandy homemade chart of several hues of blue that I like, and
• The above spread, tucked into this beautiful, art-i-fied journal made for me by my BFF: 

Sylvan's blog                                    Tiny Relics, Sylvan's Etsy shop

Sylvan makes gorgeous art journals and decorated notebooks, and she made this one for me.  It's graph paper (my favorite!!), and she even made a ruler, scaled to the size of the notebook grid (!!!), that matches the book (!!!!)  How freaking awesome is that?  I use this as my SCA sewing notebook, instead of my...er..."system" of scrabbling down costume notes and people's measurements on random scraps of whatever's handy and then losing them in The Craft Pit. 

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