Originally posted 2009-03-29 07:36:42. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Since I led it yesterday at my ANG Chapter meeting, I can finally tell you about it. My surprise project was Autumn Haze one of Laura Perin’s free designs. You’ll find it near the bottom of the page.
My one is shown at the top of this entry. The idea behind the project is to break out of your color rut and do something unexpected. Here’s how:
Pick an overdyed color at random. This piece will work better if you pick a shade which has several colors in it. Most of us have shades of these threads, Watercolours in my case, which we got but aren’t our normal colors.
In my case, I used Burning Ember. While the deep blue-violets are one of my favorite colors, orange is not, so this is outside my color comfort zone.
Pick the other threads based on your overdye. They fall into two families, make sure one of the color families is a color you wouldn’t normally use (orange in my case). Use your stash as much as possible for these threads.
Stitch away.
This was a fun challenge because I discovered some interesting things about color and color schemes.
Overdyes have transitional areas between the main colors. These can be long or short and vary from color to color and even from skein to skein. They may not be apparent in the uncut skein. I thought the main colors in this skein were orange and deep blue-violet. In addition there are two other main colors, gold and teal. Also the transitional areas are longer in this skein. As a result, the areas stitched with the overdye are more muted than I thought they would be. The gold and orange really are accents.
You can change the balance of colors in the piece by picking a different thread. In the “arrow” border the three center stitches were supposed to be the orange metallic flanked by a stitch in the orange pearl cotton. By this time, I had stitched the bottom of the arrows and found that I really liked the orange as “flashes” of color, so I wanted to have them be less prominent. So I substituted a deep blue-violet linen for the orange pearl cotton. This color seems to melt into the overdye and lets the orange metallic stand out.
The end result is something which, while outside my color comfort zone (it does still have orange in it), looks like something I would stitch.
It was a fun challenge and one of these days I’m going to do it again, probably with another orange thread.
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Wow, this project is for people like me who do not have an eye for color at all!! I could do something like this though, given I have a “palette” to start with. Great Idea!! Thanks for sharing.