Message: What are the Pantone print colors for Jacquard Acid dyes, apart from the primaries you mention? Especially Pantone "Purple" and Rhodamine".

Since each dye can be applied at dozens of widely different depths of shade, from intensely brilliant to very pale, it's impossible to map a jar of dye to a single Pantone® print color. In addition, each different fiber will give a different color for a particular dye, depending on whether you are dyeing silk, wool, mohair, nylon, or any of the other fibers that can dyed with acid dyes. The colors will vary from slightly to moderately for the unmixed single-hue dyes, from one fiber to another, but will vary dramatically for the premixed dye colors.

It is possible to give rough Pantone® equivalents for a few specific dye recipes, though results will vary according to the application method and the fiber that is dyed, but I don't know of anyone who's done this for the Jacquard Acid Dyes. Perhaps the Jacquard Products people could help you. They have an online forum where you could ask this question.

The dye retail company PRO Chemical and Dye has made some dye recipe recommendations for a very limited number of Pantone® colors, from recent fashion forecasts. They give suggestions for both their Procion MX dyes and their WashFast Acid Dyes, for the Pantone's fashion color forecast for Spring 2010 and Pantone's fashion color forecast for Fall 2009. [PDF]

You might be able to get a good color match for Pantone's 'Rhodamine' by using a rhodamine-containing dye, though of course it's unpredictable what names Pantone® will arbitrarily apply to different colors. The source of their color name 'Rhodamine' is certainly a rhodamine dye, but whether their color matches it is another question. (Sometimes it seems that Pantone® selects color names more with the intent to confuse than to describe!) Rhodamine B is a fluorescent dye, Colour Index Acid Red 52, that is sold among the acid dyes of several dye suppliers. Jacquard Products sells it under the name 620 Hot Fuchsia, while ProChem sells it under the name 370 Rhodamine Red B.

For matching Pantone's "Purple", I can only recommend that you buy the dyes whose color chips seem to best match it, to your eye, and that you then try dyeing some test swatches of fabric or small bundles of yarn to see what concentration of which dye works best for you. Weigh out your dyes and fabric in grams, so that you will be able to scale up to larger quantities while keeping the number of grams of dye per 100 grams of fiber constant.

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