community of dyers

This is a wonderful idea. I've been struck by how often the scarves on girls at my son's high school don't match their clothes at all. You notice colors more once you start dyeing and have the freedom to choose your own colors.

There's one thing you'll want to note: most pre-mixed dye colors, among dyes that work equally well on both cotton and silk, will produce different colors on the different fibers. For example, a Procion MX dye mixture that produces aqua on cotton will produce emerald on silk, when dyed using soda ash on both fibers, because the yellow in the mixture works extra-well on silk. The colors shown in the catalog for the premixed dye colors, or indicated by their common names, are, in the case of the Procion MX dyes, the ones that you'll get when dyeing cotton. They may bear little resemblance to the colors the same dyes will produce on silk.

The dyes that produce the exact same color (maybe a little lighter or darker) on silk that they produce on cotton are the pure unmixed single hue colors. There's a list of these dyes, along with common names used by major dye suppliers, in the topmost chart on my page, Which Procion MX colors are pure, and which mixtures?.

It works really well to do low water immersion dyeing using two or three of the unmixed pure Procion colors on garments of two different fiber contents. For example, the picture in this old 2006 Dye Forum post, silk and rayon, dyed to match, shows how well a rayon dress and a silk purse I dyed matched each other, because I did LWI with two pure single-hue dye colors, so each piece shows the full range of colors produced by the mixture of the two dyes. (Rayon usually produces colors similar to cotton's, since they are both cellulose fibers.)

There's another way to work around the color shifting: the colors of the Procion MX dyes shift less on silk when they are dyed with acid instead of soda ash. The dyes are not as permanent when used as acid dyes as they are when used with soda ash, but they still last pretty well. Here's a link to a page I wrote about using fiber reactive dyes as acid dyes on protein fibers.

Of course, trial and error will work in dyeing one fiber to match another. You can always overdye a scarf that's not quite the right hue. The old color and the new color will mix together. If, say, you have a reddish scarf that comes out too orange, you can overdye it with fuchsia (though this will darken the color, as well). Or, if you know that a certain color comes out stronger on silk, then you can use less of it and more of another color, when mixing.

Also check Dharma's range of cotton and rayon scarves, to see if any might be suitable for you. If any of them are, they will be easier to dye to match a cotton blouse at the same time.

I hope you will post pictures of some of your work.

-Paula