I FOUND THE GREEN!

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was trying to find a green that was the color "of a tulip leaf."  My conversation with my customer went on for several days, until I found some "Granny Apple" dye that matched the greens in the bride's shower invitation perfectly.  Here is a photo:

I made one wrap and sent it off for their approval.  The bride loved it and said it was great!  So now I have the approval to go ahead and make wraps for all the bridesmaids and pocket squares for the men.  

Here are photos of the finished product.  I love it!

Now here is the astonishing part.  As I have mentioned, I have experienced "splotches" or variegations when using greens in the past.  I have googled everything I can think of to find someone who can explain why it happens and what to do to avoid it (if anything).  So today I found an article written by someone at Dharma Trading Co. that basically said that there are too many variables for anyone to say for sure why someone gets the result they get.  Amount of dye, amount of water, temperature of water, kind of silk, whether or not it's pre-washed, and on and on.  But one particular paragraph caught my eye.  Since I had been trying to match a color exactly for my customer, I thought it's a good thing for her that I didn't see this sooner!

    "Also, when kids are tie dyeing, they are delighted no matter how the shirts look. We adults are much more critical and hard on ourselves, or we just have a vision in our head of what we think it should look like. For those trying to match the color of something else exactly, you can get lucky, or it can take days of testing and tweaking, even if you are an experienced dyer. (Folks who do color matching charge about $80 per hour! Sometimes even they can talk a couple of days to get a particular match.) "