With my west coast cousin and fellow blogger and fiber artist coming this way for a big birthday celebration, I decided to make her a tie-dye T-shirt. Lee’s a quilter and her favorite color is brown, so that set the theme. I didn’t have any brown dye, which made for an extra challenge. I found two strategies on the web: one started with boiling walnut husks, and the other was to mix all the primaries together in some unspecified proportion. I also knew from my color science research for graph colors that brown was dark orange.
After trying a few test patches, I found two combinations that worked well and used them both. One was equal parts orange and black. The other was one part cyan, two parts magenta, and three parts yellow.
My first effort was to simulate a quilt with rectangular patches. This shirt uses both browns.
Next I tried to capture the eight-pointed star pattern I’ve seen in quilts. The eight wedges didn’t quite fill out into touching diamonds like planned, but it still made a nice flower. The blue is really a mix of a dark blue and a light blue, which is what produced the glow effect.
I still had some dye left over, so I made a couple more shirts for myself. The first takes advantage of the way the cyan and yellow bleed out of the CMY brown to produce a green halo. This shirt also employs six-fold symmetry, which was a little tricky.
Finally, I went with a basic horizontal stripe pattern using the orange brown.
