I’ll never forget a lady I knew who was seriously into matching clothing. She would wear a printed corduroy dress sometimes with a hunter green background. With it she’d wear hunter green tights, hunter green shoes and a hunter green bag. And when she wore the yellow dress with the matching yellow bag and shoes, it hurt your eyes.
The lady in the picture here took matching to an extreme level, everything: dress, hat, clutch, shoes, and gloves are all the exact same color. In a way it’s a bit boring. Don’t let your needlepoint look like this!
If you watch What Not to Wear or follow fashion you have heard of the concept that your clothes should “go” not “match.” Gone are the days when everything needed to match, today color combinations are freer, include more colors and are more interesting.
That’s a lesson we can, and should, take to heart as stitchers. Let’s look at three practical examples.
1. On a painted canvas, seen above, the shoes, sash and trim on the dress were painted the same color. The bodice and skirt were painted a second, lighter color. Instead of stitching in only two colors, I thought about this as a real dress and shoes. I will use three dark threads, changing the shoes to brown, the trim to dark peach and the sash to rust, all in different threads. The bodice and skirt are two more threads.
Does it match? Not really. Does it go? Yes.
Lesson learned: If it’s painted one color on canvas, you can change some of those areas to other colors that go.
2. Several years ago a made this pillow. The background is stitched in many dark blue threads. But they aren’t all the same color, or even the same texture. I mixed them up a lot, but these colors don’t really match, they go. And by using them I created an exciting focal point for the pillow.
Lesson learned: An easy way to create colors that go is to find threads in similar but not matching colors, and mix them up.
3. An easy way to try out this concept is by looking at a fashionable color combination and trying it in Bargello or a geometric piece. I wouldn’t have thought about putting citrus colors with a pale minty green until I saw it in a fashion magazine. The needlepoint above is the result.
There are tons of free geometric patterns out there. Using one of them and inexpensive threads is a great way to try out a color scheme.
Lesson learned: Use the concept of colors that go to try out new combinations in small geometric needlepoint.
Here’s a wonderful color combo I saw in The Evangelsita blog a couple of days ago. How would you turn these colors that go but don’t match into a needlepoint?
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
Susan s. says
Ah, but tone on tone is a challenge! Not that I mind a nice color or a thousand. (My local yar