Tips for Fine Tuning Color When Dying with Food Color or Kool-Aid

While researching fiber dying on the cheap, I came across phrases like: "Garishly bright colors", "Colors too bright", "Kid's Colors"; and so on and so forth. It's a little disturbing to me, but only because I have a bit of an unfair advantage. I'm used to mixing paint colors for painting pictures. You can see a sampling of stuff I do at My Deviant Art Gallery.

I decided I should share the wealth, and not hog all this valuable information.

Here's the deal:

Dying with Kool-Aid is dying with food color, it's just powdered and mixed with malic or citric acid and stabilizers. That's terrific because you can make a super concentrated dye that won't spread out all over the place.

The point is, you can off-set or neutralize ultra-bright colors with drops of food color. I could link you to a color wheel and try to explain it to you. But it's all so simple to show with words.

Opposite colors neutralize each other. Generally opposite colors are complimentary colors, and they are any two colors that look the absolute best side by side. There's a reason why all the red and green at Christmas time look so terrific together. They're opposite/complimentary colors.

Everyone knows that yellow and blue make green, yellow and red make orange, blue and red make purple. That's it. Those are all your primary and secondary colors.

To neutralize a primary color you simply mix it with a drop or two of it's complimentary secondary color, or vice-versa. Here's a list:

Yellow and Purple

Green and Red

Blue and Orange

The list also works if you're completely stuck for how to make colors pop. Example, wide blue stripes with thin orange stripes(or reverse it). It works because the opposing colors compliment each other, and each makes the other pop!

You can use pure clean colors for your stripes or combos, or you can mix them. By adding a drop of the opposite color at a time, and adjusting back and forth untill satisfied(remembering colors will be deeper before absorbing into the fiber), you can tone down the bright colors. A drop of red added to a large ammount of green mutes the green, and you wind up with a different shade(and experimentation will lead you to just the right shade of green). A drop of green added to red makes a kind of muted red, some call maron, others call it maroon. It's that deep brownish sort of red that's akin to oxblood.

Also you can blend colors by mixing the individual colors of fiber, in varying ammounts. That's related to pointillism. George Seurat would probably have enjoy a pair of green socks that are actually made of individually dyed then blended, blue, yellow, and maybe a bit of red, fibers. One could also do this by making each ply the primary + secondary colors. I described this in an earlier post. One ply of each: red+blue+purple. When spun and knitted would make a purple optical illusion item.

I hope this helps. If you need pics to explain further, leave a comment and let me know. I think I made it all pretty clear though :).

Oooh before I forget; this would work with overdying as well. If a certain shade of red is giving you migraines, neutralize it with a weak wash of green; and so on and so forth. You would have to experiment to find exactly the colors you want, but experimenting's half the fun:).