To me being a good dyer means being able to mix the colors you want.  It requires seeing what the color is and knowing how to mix it.

The Munsell Student Kit is color training.  It comes with the little chips in the envelopes and you have to glue them into the right spot.  This is a lot harder than it seems and in the process of arranging and gluing, you train your eye to see the differences and know that they mean.  Buying the bigger books does not train your eye.   Nor does it give you the understanding to of how to fix a color when your dyeing.  You will understand the terms than Munsell used, hue, chroma and value well too by doing the lessons.  The  kit is a self-study course and very well designed.

In dyeing,  value is depth of shade.  Chroma is limited by the chroma of the pure dyes.  If you have no red with a high chroma value you can not dye any of the red colors with high chroma.  Mixing two color always decreases the chroma.

I urge you to order the kit and do the training.  The kit may seem costly but it is cheaper than a workshop and will greatly increase your ability to mix colors and get what you want.

Maybe we could do a Munsell study group?  Would the materials lend themselves to that? 

I would be willing to lead such a group.  Do we have enough people who want to invest the time and money into knowing a lot about dyeing and want to mix their own colors.

I envision each participant choosing a fiber (cotton, silk, wool,...), a form (yarn or fabric), and an appropriate dye set.  Let's say Lanaset dyes on silk yarn.   The first activity would be to dye up (immersion dyeing) several depths of shade, DOS, of all the pure, manufactured colors of your dye family and then determine what the Munsell Notation for each of those samples is.   These are the building blocks for any colors you want to mix.  With this info one would build notebooks of samples.

One would need the Student Munsell Kit, enough of the same fiber to do the entire study and all the equipment for reproducible dyeings (measuring devices in ml and grams), and the dyes and auxiliaries.

Anyone interested?  What fiber and what dye?

Jennifer--

Don't do anything with the yarn yet, we will determine what needs to be done.  I'm going to ask you why you want to use Procion MX dyes? Do you already have them?  Is it the only fiber reactives you know?  They are the most difficult of the fiber reactive dyes for cotton and other choices could make your life easier.   Do you have access to Cibaron F or FN dyes?  Sometimes we don't chose the easiest path in life.

You seem excited to get started and I would say the first thing to do is to buy the Munsell Student Kit and start reading the material and glueing in the chips.  You need to do this in natural light if you don't want to drive your self crazy.   Each sheet in the kit is a different hue and there is a bag of chips for each hue.  The places where the chips go are marked with an x.  Lay the chips on the spots -- you will soon be switching them around.  When you think that you have them in the right spots, cover them up to keep them in place and come back the next day and see if you still think they are in the right place.  When you stop moving them around you can glue them in place.  Some colors are harder to see the differences than other colors, so do the easy ones first.  You will improve by the time you do 11.  

Learn the vocabulary-hue, value and chroma. Chroma was the hardest to get my head wraped around but doing the chips sure helped.

Jennifer,   Look for the Cibacron F or FN dyes, they behave so much better.

Ok so i think that we have 3 people signed up: Jennifer, Tien when she comes back from the Honeymoon, and Mary Walker.  I need each of you to PM me with the following info:

• where do you live (so I can help with sourcing), country or state is enough

• what fiber you want to use

• is it fabric, yarn or fiber

• what dyes do you want to use

I think that I will post this on a more seen forum to see if anyone else wants to study with us.  I don't think we can call it a Dye-a-long :). 

I need a place to post info for you all, I was thinking of using pbworks.com and maybe a group on flickr for photos.  What do you think?

Weavil works:

Did you put the Munsell kit together yourself? What inspired you to do it?

No,  the Munsell system does not have formulas, formulas are very hard in dyeing because they are so dependent on the water, how they are processed, the substrate...  So your formulas will only work for you on the same fiber.  That is why every dyer has to build their own sample library and sampling is just as important a part of dyeing as it is in weaving.

Please send me a PM with the info requested in Post #21.