used with permission from Homestead Needlearts
The new shades of Caron Collection threads are arriving in stores. Ever since they came out, they have been a serious addiction to me. I buy skeins of Watercolours, the way other women buy lipstick, they are my favorite pick me up. When the new colors come out, I anxiously await the list of names, because they are so evocative of the color combinations. They are available in all four multi-color threads.
Thanks to Theresa at Homestead Needle Arts, here’s the list. The color numbers are in bold, with the name following and, in parentheses, the main colors. Thanks to Theresa for the picture as well. You can find them on her What’s New page along with many wonderful canvases.
260 Sticks and Stones (dark and very dark teal with flashes of dark gold, dark olive and light teal), 261 Karakum (dark gray with flashes of burgundy and light gray), 262 Sandalwood (semi-solid very pale dusty rose), 263 Salt and Pepper (dark to medium grays), 264 Oyster (semi-solid light warm gray), 265 Quicksilver (semi-solid very pale gray), 266 Smoky Mountains (semi-solid light gray), 267 Wisteria (pale blue to blue-violet), 268 Sahara Sunrise (blue, blue-gray and blue-violet with flashes of pink and green), 269 Bubblegum (pink to muted pink-violet), 270 Easter Egg (pastel hot pink, green, yellow-green, and lavender), 271 Wasabi (semi-solid pale yellow-green), 272 Mint (semi-solid pale green), 273 Blonde (semi-solid pale gold), 274 Summer Blonde (not a lighter shade of 273, but very pale yellow and orange), 275 Daffodil (yellow to yellow-orange, saturated hues), 276 Tequila Sunrise (orange, hot pink and yellow), 277 Hot Peppers (pale gold, peach, dark and medium-dark red), 278 Chianti (semi-solid dark wine)
Check them out for yourself at the Caron site.
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Related posts:
- Analogous Color Schemes – an Easy Method to Create Them
- Creating a Color Palette
- Needle Blending for a Dramatic Sky
- Types of Color Schemes
- Color, Needlepoint, & Van Gogh
See original here:
New Watercolours Names
unstitched canvas
The multi-colored leaves in this mini kimono from Lee Needle Arts are just perfect to show needle-blending and the wonderful effect it has on needlepoint. On the unstitched canvas pictured here, there are four different colorings of leaves. The orange leaves are solid. The green leaves have an obvious line between the two shades. The orange leaf has a less obvious distinction between the shades, and the remaining leaves blend the two colors. In this one little piece you will see two types of shading in contrast with non-shaded leaves.
The solid orange and two-tone green leaves are stitched with no blending. I picked a textured stitch for the orange leaf and it looks great. But notice the green leaves. by stitching in only two colors, a hard line if created. There is no transition. This can look OK if the two colors are close in value, but it always makes the item look less realistic. Adding something like Whipped Backstitch as a vein, visually divides the space and makes it look better.
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The two-shade orange leaf uses a blended needle of two strands of each shade of orange to create a transition zone. Although there isn’t much room for shading, see how much more realistic this leaf appears.
The three-shade leaves are the most challenging. Not only is there shading between the two oranges, there is shading between the dark orange and green. Often on canvases, such as this one, that need this kind of shading, the shading is painted on canvas.
The green-orange shading uses a blended needle with two strands of each color. The shaded area is always irregular on both sides. There should be no more than three stitches in a row. This keep the eye from seeing a pattern. Bumps, with a stitch or two sticking up, or holes, with a stitch or two missing can both be used to make the edge irregular. The line should not be the same on both sides. This is important because it keeps the eye from seeing this as a definite area, so your brain uses it visually to blend the two colors.
This canvas is small and so are the areas to blend. But the size of the blending should always match the size of the adjacent solid areas. Larger areas will need to have larger blended areas
Shading is a great tool to have in your needlepoint bag of tricks. It allows you to make subtle and realistic transitions. With it you can create colors not found in threads. You can also use it to create subtle effects on canvas. As you can see, it’s simple to do and makes your needlepoint look so good.
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Related posts:
- Divide and Conquer Shading
- Needle Blending for a Dramatic Sky
- Coloring a Needlepoint Canvas with Pens
- Thread Blending Tutorial
- Long & Short Stitch Sampler Update
Read more:
Shading in Needlepoint & Why to Do It
needle blending creates a dramatic sky
Blending more than one shade of stranded thread in a needle greatly increases your color choice. Even so, it’s most common (and best( use is to shade needlepoint. For this it excels. Better yet, it’s much easier than it seems. Anne Stradal uses this technique often for skies and has blogged about it when she uses it. You can also find detailed descriptions of how to do it in some of her stitches, such as this one.
I’ve used needleblending often and for many applications, but the sky on this Botswana angel really stumped me. It’s so dramatic that I wanted something that would make it the focal point, but still allow the sky to be dramatic. I chose to do needleblending but with two complementary groups of colors.
canvas from Painted Pony Designs
The entire sky is stitched with only four shades, three Mandarin Floss and one silk. There are two oranges and two blue-violets. As you can see from the picture of the unstitched canvas, the sky is irregularly colored, that means you must stitch slowly top make the sky look good.
To complicate matters I also decided to use a textured stitch. With textured stitches and shading, the process works the same, but if the areas are irregular, you will need to park threads in order to keep the background stitched in straight lines.
The darker shade of orange runs along the bottom, so I put my first row of Nobuko there using this color. Next I created a transition area, irregular in height, using two strands of each color of orange. Above that is the lighter color of orange.
The lighter orange is also irregular in depth and butts up against different colors. Near the giraffe there is some blue-violet. Towards the center, there is dark orange. Near the elephant it is quite high and goes to the top of that tree. I stitched all the light orange and then the solid dark orange (there is no transition here).
With the introduction of blue-violet things become more tricky. Blue and orange are complementary colors. Mixtures of complements tend towards brown and that would be a problem for this piece. I wanted a mixed color, like the canvas, but not a grayed one.
My first try used the darker shade of blue-violet, but the colors were too different in value and it looked weird. I didn’t get gray or brown. I didn’t get an intermediate color. I just go weird and unmixed. The goal in blending is to get either an intermediate color or to get random mixing. The closer the colors are to complements, the more the blend will look mixed.
By changing to the lighter blue-violet, I was able to get a thread equivalent of the mixed color on the canvas. Using the canvas as my guide, I added the transition (2 light blue-violet strands and two light orange strands) stitches. Then I added the solid light blue-violet.
Some of the drama of the sky comes from the reappearance of orange, so these stitches were done next. The arms and top of the dress have shading going to the darker shade of blue-violet. I stitched up the center. then down each arm.
While very challenging to do, I love the end result. The sky is dramatic and it shows how needle blending can be expanded to create special effects.
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Related posts:
- Thread Blending Tutorial
- Sponge Painting for a Needlepoint Design Background
- Creating a Color Palette
- The Surprise Project
- Graffiti Rendered as Needlepoint
Go here to read the rest:
Needle Blending for a Dramatic Sky
Jenny Hart, of Sublime Stitching, has a new book coming out and in preparation for it has a tutorial about
blending two colors of floss at her publisher’s site.
The technique, needle blending, is useful for shading, when you can’t find the right shade or just tom give your needlepoint an interesting effect. The first time I did it was for these pansies, because there was no floss in the color I needed.
Jenny does embroidery on cloth, but the process is the same for needlepoint. In her pictures she uses two wildly different colors, so you can see clearly how the process works, but most of the time, you will use closely related shades (pictured above).
You can even blend together a solid thread with an overdye, as I did in this fall canvas. It’s easy to do and will add such richness to your stitching, even just Basketweave.
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Link:
Thread Blending Tutorial
