Colour Dilemmas

Designing is my real passion and I just love heading to the haberdashery shop and being able to choose a rainbow of threads, often without any clear idea of what I plan to do with them. Sometimes just seeing a particular colour, ball of wool or size of canvas will spark an idea. These are then jotted down, mulled over and some will eventually be stitched, knitted or crocheted.

This New Year I am finishing off my new chunky cross stitch designs. I saw the plastic canvas last summer and immediately thought it would be perfect for children or beginners to counted cross stitch. I wanted to make the designs quite simple, using no more than four or five colours but characterful without being kitsch. I also wanted to use beautiful materials as some of the kits aimed at children seem to contain the poorest quality products which are often very difficult to work with and give disappointing results.

The design process often starts with a very, very rough sketch, a selection of photographs and then I just doodle it out on the computer. Sometimes I get lucky and  this can take a matter of minutes but often takes much longer as stitches are moved and colours changed. Then comes the fun….stitching.

Radio 4, plenty of canvas, piles of wool, good light and lots of time – these critters can be stitched many times until I am happy with the colours. Not only do they have to be looking at their best but they also need to complement their neighbours – again it helps to keep the colour palette fairly simple.

Yesterday I was debating the background to Foxy, blue or green? To be honest he looked good on both but there was already rather a lot of blue wool in the collection and the general consensus on social media was that this chap looked better on green.

Hoorah, another design complete, and on trend, rocking Pantone colour for 2017.