Updated June 15, 2018.
Overdyed threads provide both a wonderful opportunity and a real challenge for creating color schemes. I love using overdyes for my needlepoint and recently I realized two pieces used the same overdye, but with completely different results.
Overdyes fall into two groups: semi-solids and multi-colors. Semi-solids are several shades of the same color. The multi-colored overdyes have more than one color in them. Sometimes they are a recognizable color scheme (such as Christmas ovredyes with the complementary scheme of green and red). Sometimes the scheme is more subtle, such as the one I used here (from The Thread Gatherer), that is a subtle split complement.
Identify the colors in your thread. For the mitten, I picked out the green and made all my accent threads match that. For me, this allowed the pink and orange to stand out against the more muted background.
Because the Fyre Werks’ texture draws attention to itself because it’s metallic, I could pick a slightly different color here, but I didn’t need to (it’s what was in my stash). I could also have picked darker shades, or even similar shades in different textures. I’ve done Bargello with all these kinds of schemes and they work. For the cuff, I used a darker shade of the pink in the overdye, it’s related but different enough to be a strong accent.
The second piece is this mirror, done in a crazy quilt style. I used the same overdye, but instead of using green as the basis, I used pink. The other threads are also from The Thread Gatherer but are semi-solid silk/wool blends. They cover a range of values and types of red. The pink is a tint of pure red, the burgundy a tone of red-violet (relating both to the pink and the violet in the overdye), and the middle shade is red-orange (relating to both the pink and the orange).
I still have a bit of this thread, so perhaps another piece bringing out the violet is in order?
About Janet M Perry
Janet Perry is the Internet's leading authority on needlepoint. She designs, teaches and writes, getting raves from her fans for her innovative techniques, extensive knowledge and generous teaching style. A leading writer of stitch guides, she blogs here and lives on an island in the northeast corner of the SF Bay with her family
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