50 Shades of Grey - A Carol Soderlund Workshop at Pacific Northwest Art Centre, Washington

I was fortunate to be able to attend one of Carol Soderlund's workshops

She taught us her dyeing techniques while guiding our explorations of the colour wheel's neutral territory. With Carol exploring neutrals is like going down a rabbit hole.

Carol applies the dye in her unique way to get an even distribution of colour on the sample.

We cut up all of our samples and shared them with everyone else in the class.

Carol has developed a system for filing samples with their recipes in a binder making it a valuable resource.

Carol is looking very pleased because this is an exciting day in the life of a die-hard dyer.

A package arrived from Rupert and Spider containing a pot of the very first neutral grey in a pure dye powder. Up until now all greys were a mix of other colours and they tended to separate when dyeing.

Carol gave us an exercise in gradation to test the new grey dye.

She gave each of us a pure colour and using her dyeing technique we made controlled samples from the pure colour through to grey.

The results were most pleasing.

Those who wanted to went outside to learn about different discharge methods and the effects on different colours.

We got some exciting results.

Carol is an excellent teacher and I learned so much from her over the 5 days.

I learnt a new dyeing technique and vastly expanded my understanding of where neutral colours come from. 

Every student came away with a binder full of samples and recipes for hundreds of neutral colours and the understanding of how to make even more.

I look forward to taking another class with Carol.