Sweethearts Shaker Box

I’ve been so busy stitching that I haven’t taken time to share the progress on my new project, “Sweethearts Shaker Box”. In my last post, I mentioned that I would talk about color choices this time and I have some photos to share that will make my thinking clear.

Whenever I am working from an object, my intention is to respect the original artist and the color choices made when the piece was produced. One of the things I have always loved about the jar that is my inspiration were the colors; fresh and hopeful. The two blues and two green along with the rose are just so pretty together.

Before I go on to share my decision making process, a brief explanation of value in color.

A shade is a color to which black has been added.

A tone is a color to which grey has been added.

A tint is a color to which white has been added.

The colors you choose and their values make a big impact on how the piece looks and how it feels.

A color palette that has a strong value contrast will feel energized, cheerful, rich and positive, for example.

A color palette that has little value contrast tends to feel delicate, soothing, timeless and pensive.

When working from an existing piece of art that is NOT embroidered, I also have to consider reflection and absorption of color. The colors on a piece of pottery that is highly glazed and more reflective will look different than the same colors will look in wool that has been stitched.

So, with all that in mind, here is what I did and what I finally decided on.

First, I laid out the threads that I thought most closely matched the colors on the jar. I put them on top of the fabric I intended to use for the project (more about that later). The purpose of the black and white photo is to be able to see more clearly the differences in shade, tone and tint or the “value contrast”. What I want to avoid for this project is all the threads being of the same shade, tone or tint. In other words, there should be a strong value contrast. You can see in both 1A and 1B that the threads move from dark to light when looking left to right. The value contrast is greater than the value contrast in examples 2A/B. Compare the values in the photo on the right to the value card above and see which values match the threads.

In the photos above, which include the jar for reference, you can see that there is a good mix of values. ( Note: you do have to allow for the shadow on pale green, second from the right, the black and white photo makes it appear darker).

The pink color was the color I was most unsure about, so in the photos of 2A and 2B I changed only the pinkish color. I went with a color that had a bit more orange in it. As you can see from the black and white photo on the right, that change made the whole color palette a lot darker with a more limited value contrast due to the addition of a the alternate pinkish color with a darker value.

If you look closely at the photo on the right, you can see the range of values in the jar is greater than the range of values in the threads. So, palette 1 it was.

This was all going so well, until I tried VERY unsuccessfully, to work the clothing of the figures in cross stitch. My goal was to do a combination of cross stitches and surface stitches for this piece. I tried, I really tried. I charted, I experimented and I failed, dear reader. The design simply isn’t meant to be cross stitched. It was so bad that I didn’t even take one photo to remind myself of how awful it looked.

What that meant was that now the fabric on which I was stitching would change from an even weave linen to the lovely ivory linen twill I use for all my crewelwork pieces.

Now that my background color was changing, I also had to tweak my color palette. Since the arms were going to be the color of the fabric, I didn’t want an ivory for the apron.

Back to the drawing board. I replaced the ivory with a very, very pale gold color and it looked great. Whew.

Why did it work? Well, if you look at the values in the photo on the right, which are the first threads and the first fabric, and compare them to the values on the left of what I stitched, you can see that the range is pretty much the same. What’s interesting is that the stitches I chose to use don’t seem to have affected the values very much at all.

Next time I’ll be talking about stitch choices - what worked and what didn’t!