Getting intimate with MX colors

Over the last few weeks I've been doing some experiments and gathering supplies for a project that I've had kicking around in my head for the last 2 years: I'm going to dye every combination of MX primary colors. I should qualify that statement a bit and add a few "yes, I knows":

• I fully acknowledge that this might be a little crazy (in the OCD category).
• I'm only planning to dye the primaries, secondary, and tertiary colors, and I"m only dying a single value of each hue.
• Yes, there will be duplication from one color group to the next. For example, the same yellow will be crossed with multiple reds and blues.

When all's said and done (and dyed) the goals are these:

1. Produce a reference that shows how the primaries interact.
2. Identify primary triads that speak to me and merit further exploration (Soderlund color cube?).
3. Learn by doing.
4. Develop color palettes different from the one that have become habitual to me. 

So why am I doing that? Well, in part it's because I can't seem to resist doing it. Yes it's lots of work, but the discovery will be fun. And, the end result will be useful.

The dyeing plan is a little convoluted. After a couple of sessions where I dyed one or two color families at a time in small containers I realized that, while this was the easiest approach to organize, it was also the most wasteful. I would be spending most of my time mixing dye. Instead, I've developed a whopping big spreadsheet that allows me to identify every combination of the 4 yellows, 4 reds, and 5 blues--that makes 80 distinct color wheels--and shows how many 5"x 5" squares of each distinct YR, YB, and RB pair that I need to dye to assemble the wheels.

Once all of the dyeing is done I'm also going to do discharge samples to accompany each color wheel.

I'm looking at this as a 1-year project. I really want to do this, but I can't shutdown every other studio activity for this one obsession. More to come...