Hi, newbie here. I just got some rust brown from dharma and it looks really more like a darkish red on my dyed cotton shirt--- very different from the color shown in the catalog. My question for you experts is what should I add to it to make it more rusty and more brown? The colors I have on hand potentially to mix with are (all dharma procion) are camel, bright yellow, soft orange, dark brown.
Browns are the colors you obtain by mixing complementary opposites - i.e., by adding navy to orange, or purple to yellow, or red to green (or the other way around - green to red, yellow to purple, or orange to blue).
If you have a dark red which you wish to turn into a brown, you need to add some green to it, or some blue AND some yellow. Adding some yellow will turn it to a dark orange; adding some blue will then turn it brown. Doing it in the opposite order, if you add blue to your dark red, you'll get a dark purple; adding yellow to that purple will then make a brown. A rusty brown contains a little more orange than blue. I don't think any of those premixed colors you purchased at Dharma are going to make the change you want, because none of them contains any blue to speak of. Dark brown is the only one of your list that contains any significant amount of blue in the mixture. Overdyeing your dark red with dark brown should help some.
I like to use the twenty or so unmixed single-hue Procion MX type dyes for mixing, because then you really know what you have. It's also very nice that it is possible, by using unmixed single-hue dye colors, to get truer and brighter colors than by mixing those premixed colors. Of course you can always add in complementary colors to get softer, more "natural" looking colors. Note that there is no such thing as a single-dye green in the Procion MX line; you must mix yellow and blue, or yellow and black (black mixtures usually contain a lot of blue), to get green.
On my web site I maintain a chart with all of the commercially available unmixed single-hue Procion MX type dyes, along with their names and catalog numbers at each of the more major dye retailers. Look at this page:
Which Procion MX colors are pure, and which mixtures?To start with, I would advise you to get some turquoise (turquoise MX-G), some magenta (red MX-5B, sold as "light red" at Dharma), and a pure light yellow (yellow MX-8G, sold as "lemon yellow" at Dharma). These are the most useful mixing primaries in the Procion MX line of dyes and can be used to adjust any dye mixture to be closer to the color you want. I think it is important to also get a navy, such as the blue MX-2G that Dharma sells as "cobalt blue", and some orange, but you already have some orange MX dye mixtures.
A number of people have observed that dye mixtures purchased from Dharma which include fuchsia (red MX-8B) in their mixtures, such as their "bright yellow" and probably both of the browns you bought from them, sometimes tend to produce little red dots on the fabric, when the fuchsia fails to dissolve completely. I prefer to avoid purchasing dye mixtures from Dharma that might contain fuchsia. Some other suppliers tend to sell more reliable mixtures that do not require as much straining and filtering after they are dissolved. I do not know of any problems with the non-fuchsia unmixed MX dyes from Dharma, though, and it doesn't matter at all if whatever you're working on looks okay with tiny red dots. It's more of a problem when you are dyeing solid colors than when tie-dyeing or doing
low water immersion dyeing.
Paula
