Now Available!
A new book for rug hooker's by April DeConick
The Wool Palette
a rug hooker's guide
to creating and dyeing
your own color palette of wool
Excerpt from The Wool Palette
Palette Dyeing is a new concept in the rugger’s world. In the past, we largely have had to be content to work with dyes that had no familial relationship with each other. We have dyed red wool using one formula, and then tried to match it to wool we had dyed using an entirely unrelated brown formula or a green formula dug out of scores of recipe books and dyeing manuals filling our shelves.
As an artist, this made me frustrated. I was never able to find all the colors and shades of wool I needed to bring my designs to life. Yards of wool I had purchased for projects lined my closet because the color or shade was not right once the wool was hooked into my designs. I was tired of the ‘dump and dye’ method, holding my breath that the wool I was dyeing would come out right. I was discouraged when I was unable to reproduce the color exactly when redyeing, no matter how good my notes were.
So I decided to begin approaching my rug hooking from the point of view of a painter who mixes her entire palette of colors by combining three primary paints – a red, a yellow and a blue. By combining these three paints, all the colors imaginable are created, in all their values, tints, tones and shades. And the best thing about it? All the colors look great together because they form a family created from the same basic three paints. I had the thought, “Why not with my wool?!”
So Palette Dyeing is conceived from the point of view of a painter who creates all her colors from the three primary colors, by mixing red, yellow and blue. But here is the catch. This process is not about taking pre-made red, yellow and blue straight from the packet and mixing them. This process is about creating your own unique formulas for the three ‘primary’ colors so that the result will be your own unique color palette of wool. In other words, it is about beginning by mixing a red you love, a yellow you love, and a blue you love, and then combining these signature dyes to create the twelve hues on the color wheel, neutrals and grays and everything in between.
In these lessons, I will be providing complete step-by-step instructions about this process. I will introduce you to color and mixing dyes so that you are able to create your own signature palette of wool. I will also share with you dyeing techniques so that you can create beautiful gradated, textured wools and dappled wools with your palette dyes, wools that will give your rugs fantastic appeal. You will learn in these lessons how to easily dye any color, any value, any time. The lessons begin with instructions for the 8-gradation dyeing process used to create your palette wools. Next color theory is discussed since it forms the basis for Palette Dyeing. Then the lessons proceed with instructions for creating your own 67 Palette Dyes and information about dyeing a single color and value in yardage rather than swatches. The lessons assume no prior knowledge of dyeing, proceed step-by-step through all processes and include notebooks for your samples.