Sketching, Stitching, Crocheting

So sorry I neclected my blog. My cold was still lingering, and heaps of stuff to do at work. I always was so exhausted after work. I don’t like staring at a computer or doing too detailed embroidery with sore eyes. Now I’m really better and regular blogging and crafting will hopefully resume.

First I show a little sketch done outdoors, It shows, well, corn, and a little pointless doodling with colour. I call it “the colours of corn”.

Second is a little sneak peak at some crochet I did on the commute. I’ll show more of it after hiding the loose ends, washing and blocking.

Last, another sneak peak at some embroidery I currently work on.

tif 2 – dissecting the colours

I have been painting too much: I still seem to think in acrylic pigment colours not in DMC colours.

Like I always seem to do when working with colours, I looked for the acrylics I can use to mix them. I chose light ochre, English Red and Indigo, together with white for the mixed colours. Basically the yellow/red/blue colour scheme in somewhat muted colours. I show the pure colours and equal mixes, and how I made the tif colours from them.

The blues are just Indigo and white, the ochre is light ochre as it comes out of the tube, the beige is light ocre and English red in equal parts plus loads of white. Of course, you could just use water + the effect of the white paper to make it more light. As a comparison, I added the original palette again.

tif 2 – yarn colours

One more post about Sharon’s take it further challenge. Several people have posted DMC colour numbers, and they did not agree. For lack of time and energy, I didn’t go to a big store in a big city but to a local one wich has only a limited selection of coats mez floss. I didn’t even have a printout with me because I don’t have a colour printer, so my colours are just a rough guess. not a bad fit imho, but the two light blues are not as dull as the ones in the colour scheme. They were the most dull blues that shop had.

By the way, I can’t quite decide if the light blues are diluted indigo as I stated in my last posting about the tif colours or more greyish. the light beige is certainly no diluted version of the darker one as I assumed earlier for the sake of simplicity. It has much more red in it. I guess I’ll go back to experimenting with paint some more.

I made some progress on the desert embroidery, but not enough to make me scan and post it again.

TIF 1 – admiration in dull colours

Now I finally tell you what my fussing at the end of the old year was all about – I have a new job. I signed the contract January 2, the day I started. I didn’t want to tell anybody before the contract was actually signed – superstition and such. Now I’ll have to see how much time I will have for stitching. I am very glad that I have a job, and the upside will be that I’ll have money to spend on craft supplies.

Sharon B has posted the first issue of the TIF challenge. the topic is admiration, the colour scheme rather dull green-grey, beige, violet and turquoise. Pam Kellogg posted DMC colour numbers for these, and I went ahead to buy them. By the way, please check out Pams blog, it is gorgeous. I think the violets and the turquoise are much too bright for the scheme Sharon posted, but there are not so many dull colours in the DMC palette. Maybe I can find fabric that matches them better. Below you see the yarn and the sampler.

Now, what to do with them? the topic of admiration left me cold at the first thought. I guess I’m too much of a cynic to truly admire someone, although I do have respect or love or both for many people. The colour scheme itself also doesn’t spark any ideas. It’s a strange mix of dull and candy colours which does not really speak to me.

I have decided to go with both the colour scheme and the theme of admiration anyway, and I think I have half of an idea. it will be about some Rock star I used to admire in my wild youth, combined with something about the downsides of such behaviour. I don’t have any details in mind yet, not even whom to pick. For now, I have doodled with the embroidery threads a little bit to see how the colours will work together when actually used. I have to say it turned out better than I thought it would. I think inspiration will come, and I still have three weeks. The mini sampler is far away from done, but I wanted to show something and share my thoughts on the first weekend.

orange again

This is a little knitting test I did for a jumper that probably won’t happen because I’m not as fond of the material as I thought I would be. I’m posting it because it shows which colour should best go with red-orange for my gut feeling. It is just slightly off the official complemetary colour (turquoise), and again to the yellow side, just as in my favourite orange/turquoise combination. I have posted some musings about orange here before.

I don’t know yet if I’m going to use this as a background for some felting and stitching, or if I just keep it as is in that ring binder I abuse as a kind of visual journal.

about orange

During the last two weeks I added some bits to one of my WIPs, the goldfish . The background fabric is a bit more on the greenish side than the scan shows. This made me think about my use of colours. The following is not meant as a lesson in colour use but as a rant about my personal use of certain colours. If it has any use for others than as a prompt to think about your very own relationship to colours. The pictures I painted for demonstration have no meaning, I was just doodling.

Orange and turquoise is one of the colour combinations I use very often in my creative work although I would name none of them as favourite colours. The goldfish picture is cleary a variant of this even if the turquoise is rather muted.

I did some doodling with acrylic paint to demonstrate my colour choice. Turquoise and that pure orange I like to go with it are not complimetary colours. If you mix them, you’ll find that there’s too much yellow in the mix for complimetary colous. I seem to be preferring harmony over exitement here.

Now, the next picture shows the same orange and its complimetary colour according to the traditional colour weel . That would be blue. You can see that blue and orange mix up to black. I do kind of like this combination, but I seem to use it very rarely. Maybe I’m going to add something blue to the goldfish pic just for the heck of it.

The next picture shows the same turquoise and a red orage, which is approximately its complimentary colour acording to the traditional colour weel . The fact that they don’t mix up to black has more to do with the pigments than the colours. For me, this contrast looks horrible when used in such massive ammounts, but I still did use it in the goldfish piece. I used red-orange for small parts of the goldfish. I just stumbled over this blog post about Luci’s orange and turquoise doodling cloth, so obviously there are people out there who love this colour combination. Amazing how different we all are.