Color Works! Finally A Color Guide For The Rest Of Us!

Color Works, The Crafter’s Guide to Color by Deb Menz, Available from Amazon

Hardcover and spiral bound, built to take with you and take the abuse.

Stumped about which colors to use in a craft project? Ths book give you practical, hands-on tools for using color in nine crafts, including knitting, spinning, weaving, quilting, surface design (including stenciling and rubber stamping), hand and machine embroidery, beadwork and paper collage.
Color theory principls are demystified with clear explanations, examples, and more than 270 hand-crafted swatches that bring color palettes to life in all nine mediums.
Contents include: Describing Color, Basic Color Relationships, Understanding Value, Color Contrasts, Color Harmonies, Characteristics of Media (knitting, spinning, weaving, embroidery, quilting, collage…), Choosing Colors and Design.
Includes several pull out tools to take with you to make sure you pick colors that harmonize and play well together.

If you signed up for a Color and Texture class in college, I imaging this would be one of the textbooks that you’d be reading.

So much information. One of the most useful tips I’ve ever received for matching colors is to use the black and white settings on my camera to take a picture. Almost like magic, the hues, and shades just jump out of the frame! It actually made me commit to memory, that particular feature on my digital camera. That in itself is huge!

When asked about color, Eunny Jang sums it up by saying: “Eunny Jang says: ” “Pick two color families (hues). Then pick three variations of each–dark, medium, light. Now you have six colors that go together beautifully!”

Sandy Wiseheart of Knitting Daily has worked up two different swatches using the principles in this book. To download the charts for these swatches, go here (you have to be a member and log in to get the swatch charts).

Next Pattern:

I can’t resist a pattern that’s both useful and a little silly, and that’s exactly how I feel about the Rybka pouch pattern from the delightfully named Rat and Sea Witch.

I know you’re going to ask, because I did, too. Rybka means little fish in Polish. (And because you’re also probably going to ask, Rat and Sea Witch comes from people’s attempts to say the designer’s name, Ratasiewicz, which if you say it fast kind of sounds like rat and sea witch.)

It’s easy to make a little fish bag in different sizes to suit your needs. The pattern has specific instructions for an Airpods Pro case and a pencil case, but you could change the length easily to hold more stuff, and change the size in general by working with a different weight of yarn.

The pattern calls for sock yarn and mohair held together to make a fingering weight gauge, but you could try it with heavier yarn and see what size bag you end up with.

Whatever size you make it, this looks like a fun project for holding trinkets or everyday items. The mouth of the fish is the mouth of the bag, and it closes with a drawstring that is also the strap. I wonder, too, if you could make one of these with a small clasp frame that could be the fish’s mouth and then you could just work I cord straps that would attach to the sides of the fish.

I could also see stripes, or fish of different colors to use up your yarn leftovers. How about a sunglasses case with a little loop to attach to your bag? Once you start thinking about all the ways you could use a fish-shaped bag in your life, I think you’ll see that you probably need more than one.

If you make one of these I would love to know how it went!

You can grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Rat and Sea Witch]

Next Pattern:

Have you read?