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).

Fall will be here before we know it, and that means there are holidays coming right behind where we might be entertaining at home. It’s always fun to have a hand knit touch in your home for other people to see, and if you’re going to be in the kitchen all day you might as well have some nice knit dish cloths to use.

I love this little plaid hand towel from Darling Jadore. Use a little bit of leftover cotton yarn from another project for the plaid portion. It looks like the horizontal stripes are worked as you knit and the vertical stripes are done with duplicate stitch, making this a quick and easy project even newer knitters can make.

Combine garter stitch and an easy eyelet pattern worked sideways to make the Annette Dish Towel from Cluck Cluck Boots, which is meant to be reminiscent of flour sack towels. It calls for DK weight yarn and you can work it in one color or two (or even three!).

Add a little more texture with this set of kitchen towels from Whileberry Creative. They’re mostly worked in garter stitch with borders in easy knit/purl patterns, and you can work them in sport or worsted weight yarn.

Two of Wands Shop has another cute allover knit and purl pattern they call the Seersucker Textured Tea Towel. It’s an easy repeating pattern worked in worsted weight yarn, and there’s a chart in the pattern you can use, but don’t have to, if you want to practice knitting from a chart.

The Classic Cloth dish towel from Handmade Home by Connie is another one that can use a little leftover yarn in a contrasting color, or you could color block it our use stripes throughout the pattern. This one uses worsted weight yarn and another easy repeating knit purl stitch pattern.

If you like to hang your towel on the oven handle or elsewhere but it’s always falling off, try the Stay Put kitchen towel from Fancy Step Knits. This project is worked in garter stitch and includes a hole partway through so you can pull the towel through itself over a rod or handle. Stripes are optional but a nice addition.

Have you read?