The saddest thing I see is when a craftster works their heart out in a piece, and the stitches are crisp and lovely, the motifs beautifully executed, and the pattern otherwise impeccable, but the color choices clash and detract from the beauty of the design and ruin the piece or at least, take away from its elegance and loveliness. Some color combinations make a person dislike an item and they don't even know why. Let's talk about color, about how to match it as easily as possible in a lovely and attractive way. I began crocheting when I was six years old, when my mom taught me how. But I was drawing before I could read or write, so after a roundabout turn, I went to art school. I hated it. I used to think that they took out of you all your spontaneity, all the natural inspiration that was bursting out of you (which of course, without a teacher, you did not know how to use to create any art.) Before I ever drew anything with a teacher, I had a color theory class and the teacher wanted us to make grey. Yes, not pink, orange, peach, or any lively color, but GREY! He wanted us to spend our time mixing all the color combinations we could come up with to create as many shades of grey as we could, brownish grey, bluish grey, greenish grey, purplish grey, reddish grey. . .you got the idea. Teachers love that kind of exercise, it's like making you work on pages and pages of crosshatches, until you can make them ever so evenly, or work on applying your pastels so evenly in your background that it is almost as smooth as wall paint. That is not going to happen at your first or second try! Don't worry, this is going to be easier than that. Let me lay a foundation first for you to undertand things better and be able to make good combinations on your own. As you well know there are
Three Primary Colors: Red, Yellow and Blue. And then there is black and white which, if you were making a painting, would serve you to create your light and your shades which give expression to your subject. All color combinations come out of that small group of colors, and an attractive combination depends a lot on how you apply that knowledge. When you mix the three primary colors, you come up with the
Secondary Colors: red and blue makes purple. Blue and yellow makes green, and red and yellow makes orange. Going a little further, you can create
Terciary Colors by mixing a primary with a secondary color, for example, blue and purple, you get a bluish purple or blueviolet. If you mix an already mixed orange with a bit more yellow, you get yellow-orange, which is a terciary color, if instead of using more yellow, you use more red, you get red-orange. If you make purple and add a bit more red to it, you wind up with a red-violet. and the last terciary is yellow-green, which of course is created by mixing a bit more yellow into a green. And you can go on and on like this. Rose would be a nice shade of red with white mixed into it. Peach is nothing but that same rose color with some yellow added to it. Red and green mixed together make up a muddy shade of brown, which you can liven up with some orange or with some yellow to make it more pleasant. Brown with yellow and white in the right proportions will make beige in various hues. And the addition of white or yellow will create tints, shades and subtle hues of the same color, just as the addition of black will harden or darken the same colors. For colors like burgundy or wine, you will start with a nice warm red, then you will add a little bit of warm, deep blue, and then, if you wanted your shade of burgundy to be darker, you would add a really tiny bit of black to it. If you want grey, the safest would be black and white in various proportions. This is one of the secrets of good color combinations. Let me explain. If you go to a store and you see a top that is brown, purple and a mustard shade of yellow, but it just happens to look really pretty, you might not know that the reason why that color combination would work is because purple is red and yellow, brown is green and yellow (mostly) and mustard is nothing but a brown with a lot of yellow in it.
They are all related! It is true that you could use contrasting colors, and that could be done very effectively, but people mostly make the mistake of choosing colors that clash because they don't think about the relationships between the hues and sometimes because the combinations collide. If you are making a sweater for your child and pick out crayon colors such as green, blue, orange, yellow and red. Of course it is going to be gorgeous (look at the combination! It is basically the three primaries and two of its closest secondary colors.) I made a scarf using brown and two shades of pink and it turned out pretty. Why? Brown has some red in it and so does pink, so they "match." Instead of going into a deep study of the theory of color, and how to use a color wheel, I will teach you some tricks that you might use to make your use of threads and yarn more attractive than ever before and without much of a hazzle to you. Also to make items that look like you have used "painted" yarns which don't look like any in the market. It is very simple. There are 4 ways of doing this.
1. Choose 1
variegated yarn that you absolutely love (leave the headache of the color combinations to the artists in the yarn companies) and choose 2, 3 or even 4 colors of
SOLID-C
olored yarns whose hues absolutely match some of the colors in the variegated yarn. Then you would use them as follows: Row 1- variegated, row 2- 1st solid color, row 3- variegated, row 4- use
2nd solid color, row 5- variegated, row 6- use the third solid color, then repeat from row 1. This, of course, following the stitch you have chosen for the garment, handbag, afghan, etc. The example you see here has a variegated and several contrasting but harmonizing solids. The variegated yarn is red, orange, yellow and pink. The solids are yellow, orange, blue and green. They do not clash because they are related.
2. Way of doing it is by mixing
two or three variegated yarns in the same family of colors, possibly, similar variegates so that nobody would be the wiser, but the overall color would be a lovely palette that would be very attractive and unique. It will be different from any item made with similar yarn. This example has two variegated yarns, One is red, pink, yellow and orange, the other has pink, yellow, white, green and blue. They do not clash because again, they are related even though you see a change in the colors forming stripes in the yarn.
3. Use
two variegated yarns that are contrasting but harmonize and interject some solids as shown before.
4. Use 2 or 3 variegated yarns that are so similar (but with subtle changes) that people won't know it is not the same yarn. This sock was made
with 3 varietaged finger weight yarns but you cannot tell when one starts and when one ends because the palettes are very similar, they are just slightly different. The differences make up for a lovely overall effect. And of course, to find out if they harmonize, you fall back to the previous information I gave you about the color mixtures that make up new colors, your primaries, secondaries, and terciaries.
Begonia in the Shade, a pastel study. This is part of my artwork. Not for sale. May not be reproduced.
I am sharing these two samples of my work to show you something about the application of color. One has different shades of pink to make the begonia realistic and the cool grey to soften the harshness of the black shadows against the white pot. And the green begonia leaves have some brown in them to warm them up. The other is a happy combination of various shades of red, orange, yellow and green, with some blue, white and brown for contrast, but you see, blue and brown "match". I hope you found this little tutorial useful and that it helps you to "make" gorgeous combinations of yarn and thread from now on.
Fall Harvest (detail), part of my artwork. Not to be reproduced. Not for sale.
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If you are a scrapbooker and a crocheter, then you know how wonderful it is to add crocheted embellishments to your scrapbooking, especially if you are clever and are looking to save some money in ready made stuff or if you just want something original. If you crochet and love scrapbooking but never thought of joining the two. Here are some ideas you can try
to open the doors of your imagination: 
to show you some of these examples put 
into practice. But of course, 
to show you some of these examples put 
into practice. But of course, 
