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Expanding The Dye Calculator

Hello fiber friends,

So I know I promised to share with you how to expand the use of your dye calculator in my last post and purposely did not say when that would be because, as a woman of many hats I knew it could be some time before I got to don my blogger hat but I did hope it would be sooner than this so I apologize for making you wait such a long time.


I promised two "expansions" to the dye calculator and that I would show you my CMYK specific version. I'll share the CMYK version in its own immediately after this goes live so I don't pack too much info into one place.


So let's get into it. Firstly how to expand your calculator to give you more columns for primary colors, then I will show you how to expand it to give more rows for more colors per colorway.


Here's how your Dye Calculator looks to begin with:

(If you missed the break down on how this works see my earlier blog post here.)

To add more spaces for more primaries (say you like to mix 5 or more primaries into each color to get exactly the shade you want or maybe you have 20 total primaries and even though you only use 3 on each individual color those change from hue to hue and you want columns for each primary you ever use. Whatever the reason that four primaries isn't enough for you adding them to the calculator is pretty easy but it does take a few steps.


This video takes you through the process. But here are the steps written out:

1. Click and drag to highlight both the entire yellow and the entire green chart. Then grab your highlighted section by clicking on the bottom and drag it over one column. You should now have all primaries aligned into one column.


2. Scroll to the top and selecting Column "H" (aka the last primary color column), hit the little arrow and click "Insert 1 right" This will create your column! It doesn't do anything yet but it looks nice.


3. After taking a moment to name your new primary column, scroll down and click and drag to highlight the last of your original primary columns from the top of the yellow chart to the bottom of the green. There will be a small blue box in the bottom right corner of the highlighted area. Click and drag over to your new column. Now the formulas that make The Dye Calculator work have been copied over to your new column. To check that you've done this step correctly put some percentages in your new input field and see that some numbers will appear in the corresponding yellow and green cells.


Now you have a new working primary color input column. If you need more than one you just repeat steps 2 and 3. But you only really need to copy over the formulas once. Observe:



Last you can move you charts back to their starting position. This is really just an neatness thing so it's not necessary but I like my charts to be aligned to the left.


And done!


But what if you also need more colors. Like, say you're space dyeing a skein with 10 separate colors. I don't like dyeing with that many colors at once but you're not me so add however many colors you need to make this work for you. It's pretty much the same as adding new primaries but we're working with rows now instead of columns.

Here are the steps:

1. Move your small blue chart out of the way. Then move your yellow and green charts so that they are aligned with the blue chart horizontally.


2. Right click the last row of your charts (should be row 10). Select "Insert 1 below" from the drop down list repeat as many times as you need to get as many color rows as you want.


3. Put everything back to align left.


That's it do let me know how if you enjoyed this post by commenting either here or on Facebook or Instagram


Go forth and DYE ALL THE THINGS!

 
 
 

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