Dear Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream

A couple of summers ago, after reluctantly going completely decaf during the spring, I bought a carton of my favorite coffee ice cream, and had some for dessert. That night I found myself sitting up in bed, wide awake at 3:00 AM, saying "Coffee ice cream!?!"

I'm sure there are many more of us who still love the flavor of coffee ice cream, but would like to sleep at night. So please, where you lead, others will follow; let there be decaf coffee ice cream.

You are so good at names, I'm sure you'll come up with something great - but Decaf Café comes to mind.

Hopefully yours,
Mina

I just read this color book

I just finished reading the best book about color mixing for artists, Blue & Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox, and found his site, www.schoolofcolor.com and wrote him a letter.

Jan 1, 2007
Dear Michael Wilcox,

When I was in high school, I remember asking the physics teacher what made a material colored, what was the interaction between light and matter that produced color. His answer was "That's a good question" which my father decoded for me as saying that he didn't know the answer.

Since Dad was a physical chemist, he provided part of the answer: the energy of a photon of a particular wavelength of visible light must be matched by the energy absorbed by an electron as it jumps to an available space in a higher orbital shell. That is what physically happens when light is absorbed by material. The chemistry of this is different for each substance, and thus the wavelegths of light that can be absorbed. If the lesser energy released as it falls back into its original orbital shell is in the visible range, that is fluorescence.

I have always been interested in color; I wish I had pursued that interest further long ago.

I just finished reading Blue & Yellow Don't Make Green, which I had heard of when I took a color theory course several years ago. That course expanded my universe. You have just given it another dimension. I was excited to see the books shown in the back on Colour in Gardening & Quilting, and disappointed to not find them available yet.

As a fabric dyer, color mixing is one of my major interests. I started dyeing because I wanted to make a complex color wheel, useful for color choices in quilts & wearable art, and the colors were not available in fabrics. The whole process of dyeing and figuring out color mixes became totally absorbing, and quilting got forgotten. Now I am trying to set up a color mixing system of dye primaries for Procion MX fiber reactive dyes, to put on the web.

It is disappointing that almost all the books about color for quilters and fiber artists use the same old grade-school color wheel. I was working in a bookstore when one of them, Christine Barnes, was writing her book, and I pointed out to her the books on color theory by Jim Ames & Jose Parramon, which at least use a different three colors from red yellow & blue. She said she'd stick with the color mixing she was taught in school, rather than present any alternate ideas. So does everyone else, apparently, but perhaps partly because they don't know any alternative exists.

The best of the quilters writing on color that I've found, Joen Wolfrom, uses the Ives color wheel, with yellow, turquoise (cyan), and fuschia (or magenta) as the dye primaries. I still wasn't happy with the bland colors I could mix with those primaries, which are similar to printers primaries.

So I went to other color-mixing primaries, and also mixed from mixed colors, to get the rich jewel tones I like. Fiber reactive dye chemistry is different than paints, and the pigments are not the same, but your system of thought makes sense of the rich colors I could mix without being able to explain. (red + green = purple?) (violet-red + teal-green)

I can mix much richer dye colors than the gamut a printer can reproduce with a CMYK system. Now I have an idea why. Thank you.

Mina Wagner

For future articles that I would like to see:

Color as used in batik, which can involve many layers of dye application, and in which color planning is particularly important, would be of great interest to me. I have spent years developing a dye palette, but don't have all the colors of the rainbow figured out. Also, many layers of dyes complicates understanding the results. It's why I took color theory originally.

Also, enamel glazes on silver or gold involve rich depths and layers of color. There I have some design ideas, but without the years of recipes. A guide to the behavior of specific colors in mixes would be welcome.

PS This isn't Michael Wilcox' color wheel, it's an RGB-CMY one I've been playing with.

If you would make it, I would buy it & dye it

This is a copy of a letter I just sent to Dharma Trading, my favorite dye supply house for all the dyeable clothing they have. It's wonderful to have clothing available that I can have in any of my favorite colors, just by dyeing it. (Of course, I've spent half-a-dozen years working out recipes for those favorites.) I like several of their dresses, skirts, and shirts, but there are some favorite styles they don't carry.


Dear Dharma folks — I have been meaning to write you with some style requests for years. Now some of the styles I wanted are everywhere this year, and if I had written you, who knows, you might have already had them. Two things I especially wanted are full-length wrap or surplice dresses, and empire-waist tie-back dresses with flared skirts. (Also a full-length princess dress like the one you have.) Set-in or cut-on kimono sleeves. Ankle-length at least after shrinkage, with a minimum hem circumference of 120 inches or so. And please include long-sleeve versions for dressy winter dresses.

And plus sizes of course. Especially the empire-waist with flared skirts. That is the most flattering style of all time on women of ample construction. I noticed that a long time ago, when I was very slender waisted, and loaned a costume to a woman much larger, who looked fantastic in it. The flared skirts make or break the design. Do you remember granny dresses from the late 60s? They were empire-waisted but straight-cut, and had that classic sack-of-potatoes-tied-with-a-string look.

The Vogue pattern picture (top of page) is of a vintage pattern, not current, unfortunately. It seems that the waist is at the waist in the photo, but in the drawing, the altered proportions make it more like an empire waist. Notice how the drawing makes the skirt even more flared (besides the taller-&-thinner-than-human thing). They always seem to make the skirts more flared in the pictures, to make the dress look better. I say, why not cut the dress for real like that in the first place?

Do you collect old Peterman catalogs? I have a stack of them in my style notebook, with pages marked. Those classic styles keep reappearing. Here's a scan of one, a surplice waist long dress. I'd rather not have the front slit, but it'd be gorgeous on someone young. The advantage of a real wrap would be that it opens flat and could be dye painted or leaf-dyed, not just dyed.

The second picture is of a wrap-top I actually bought. It is my favorite thing for a dressy winter outfit in other people's warm houses. I'd like a dozen more in all my favorite dye colors.













I'm in the process of making myself some new patterns, starting with commercial ones and combining & changing them, to make lined-reversible wrap and empire dresses. I plan to make them with hand-dyed and commercial batiks, to start with. If you made them, I could just buy them & dye them. Please?

Do I have a stack of white clothing already waiting? … Don't ask how big. I wanted to say, however, that your new Berkeley shirt is great. Just what I was looking for to wear to work. I'll probably be ready for another half-dozen soon. I think I might pleat the shoulder though, after dyeing.

I hope you'll email me back saying that you already have those styles in development, and didn't need this request. But now that I've started, I'll probably continue to bug you with requests. Are there any dye-able karate jackets out there?

Your very faithful and appreciative customer,
Mina Wagner