Color Palette Inspiration

I have a lot of hand embroidery patterns with flowers so I am always looking for floss color inspiration!

This floral picture has been painted in such a beautiful color palette. I am planning to borrow it.

I will add floss samples from this palette to my color inspiration journal - like I did here:

and here:

You can read about my color palette inspiration journal here

I can see a few more colors to add but this is shaping up to be an excellent floral color palette!

 

Embroidery Floss Swatch Book

I have been making myself embroidery floss swatch books.

These will be very helpful for matching floss to color numbers.  

I have a fairly large inventory of  DMC cotton embroidery floss that I store in color order. 

Typically when I have new floss

I wind it onto floss bobbins.  I slip the number tag under the wound floss.

Every so often, I lose a tag and then have no way of knowing the floss color number.  Being able to match my floss to a numbered swatch will solve that problem! 

For my swatch books, I am using two archival scrapbooks.  

For the number system, I was going to use a DMC printed list of their floss numbers but they are adding new ones all the time so to keep my books current,  I thought it best to use consecutive numbers from 1 to 5000.  I printed strips of numbers:

 

I glued the strips onto the scrapbook pages and added the floss next to the numbers.

This system is working so well!

Color and Color Palette Inspiration

I love working with colors.  I find color inspiration in so many places, such as the beautiful picture shown above.  This is a picture I cut from a desk calendar a few years ago.  I saved it because I loved the color palette.

I save anything I find to be a color inspiration and I like to keep it in a scrapbook or art journal.  
Here are a few of my art journals:

This journal I keep specifically for embroidery color palettes.  

It has blank pages of medium weight sketching paper.
I usually glue or attach whatever is my inspiration onto the page.
I often match embroidery floss to the inspiration color palette:

and record the floss numbers.

I was reminded to share this when I saw that the new Pantone 2016 Fall Fashion Report colors were released. 
I like to set up a journal page with their seasonal color palettes and match them to embroidery floss.
Here is my journal page with the colors and the DMC thread color numbers:

and here are the colors stitched on fabric.  It is a really beautiful palette!

Organizing - Floss and Color

I am in the process of organizing all my embroidery floss.  I really like to see how beautiful it looks neatly stored in these plastic floss boxes.  I have a small bunch of skeins still left to wind up on their bobbins.

I was looking at the order of colors on my color wheel and I decided to arrange my floss in that order.   Such a nice collection!  It looks like I have a lot of floss and a good color selection doesn't it?  Well...

..during my organizing, I came across this list that I picked up from the fabric store quite a long time ago. 

It lists all the floss color numbers that DMC offers.  There is even a check list to mark off the colors you have.  Imagine my surprise when I checked off all of my floss and realized that I have 89 different colors - wow! But that is out of a possible 454!!!  I have only tried about 20% of their colors.

I find I tend to buy the same colors over and over.  I need to branch out - I would love to collect the whole list of colors.  I wonder about any of you?  Do you keep track of your floss colors and does anyone have a whole color collection?

Purple And Green

Here is my progress so far on my olive branch border.  I have been experimenting with the olives.  I have tried various thicknesses of floss and I think that the olive in the top left of the picture is the winner.  Three strands of floss in rows of backstitch as a fill.  I think that will work!  The leaves are done in the fishbone stitch.     I also have progress to show on a new project:

This says "Benvenuti Amici" which is Italian for "Welcome Friends" .  I am using the chain stitch for the lettering and for the motif on the bottom the double knot stitch.  You may recognize the double knot stitch, remember this disaster?  Let's just hope I don't have to remove any of these stitches and risk it happening again!
I really love the color combination of purple and green, as you can see by both of the above projects.  I was looking at my color wheel and noticing that purple and green are part of a triad with the third color being orange.  I think I will have to use some orange somewhere on the benvenuti stitching. 

There are so many beautiful shades of green, I am growing several of these pale green zinnias this year, I really love the light green color.  I should have grown some purple flowers to go with them!

These are certainly not purple but I can't resist their beautiful color!

Ladybug Embroidery Pattern Packet

I really enjoyed stitching this little ladybug and whimsical mushrooms: This is one of the images from the new Ladybug Embroidery Pattern Packet:Can you spot all the different stitches I used? I used the back stitch, french knots, chain stitch, satin stitch and the long and short stitch! One of my favorite parts of a new embroidery project is the selecting of colors! I knew red and black would be on the short list...but for the rest, I relied on my color wheel:
I selected red as the "pure color"
according to the color wheel, the tetrad, or four colors that will make a nice relationship with red are orange, yellow, purple and blue. I didn't want to use blue, so I tried again, using orange as the pure color:
The four colors for orange are red, yellow, purple and green! Perfect!I have listed the pattern packet in the big B Etsy shop.

Color - whites and grays

I have been stitching snowflakes and snowmen - mostly on white fabric. I love the look of white on white but look at these beautiful floss colors: the are all pearl cotton floss, size 5. The gray on the left is dmc #414, the middle one is dmc #762 and the one on the right is dmc #5200. I wanted to try the grays on white so I stitched this snowflake border with the medium gray #762: I think it looks beautiful against white fabric!The white floss looks good on white and also on this powder blue fabric: Now to find a project for the darker gray floss!

Color - little flower project

The floss pictured here is DMC# 340. Do you like this tint of blue:

with this tint of yellow - DMC #727:
with this tint of red DMC #603?
According to my new color wheel - a "tint" is a pure color (in this case blue, yellow, and red) with white added to it. These three tints are three colors apart from each other on the color wheel. This means they are a triad and make a beautiful color combination. I used them on this little flower stitching. You may also notice, I am showing off my open chain stitch for the picture border!

Color - my new color wheel!

I love the fact that embroidery floss comes in such a huge variety of colors. I know that one of my favorite parts of embarking on a new stitching project is the process of selecting colors. I want to learn more about color theory and color relationships and so I bought this color wheel. It is so much fun to use and has so many interesting color facts and advice. For instance, I have this little stitching project from "Shhh...Baby's Sleeping":
What colors to use? I know I want to use this beautiful blue as this is for a baby boy.
According to the color wheel, a nice relationship would be a triad of colors. That means three colors that are evenly spaced on the color wheel and will always look pleasing as a combination:

So the other two colors in the blue triad are red:
and yellow:

I think that makes a beautiful color combination!

I am using the blue to outline the ball in back stitch:
and red for the stripes - I used the split stitch here:

now all three colors for the french knots and
satin stitch stars!

I think I am really going to enjoy this new color wheel and all the new color combinations it suggests! Speaking of color, I have to include this picture of my sweet pea bouquet looking so pinky and beautiful on my shelf!