Most of my work centers around threads, so I fuss about them quite a bit. Most threads divide into their components: metallic, rayon, cotton, and polyester. Fs 2/20 is a bit different. It has a black core the metallics are wrapped around and when it’s used in zigzag embroidery looks like little beads.
Madeira Threads Metallic Thread Color Chart FS 2/20
These lizards were stitched as bobbin work, out of FS 2/20. The eyes are sliver.
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In contrast, these butterflies were all out of Supertwist Madiera metallic, with FS 2/20 bodies. Again, shiny Sliver eyes.
Why does all that matter? Because those three kinds of thread offer a totally separate look that makes the objects embroidered in them automatically different from each other. Your eye sorts for shiny first. That means that first, it sees the shiny eyes, then the supertwist butterflies, and finally the rich beaded looking lizards. Now, how cool is that?
FS 2/20 is not an easy thread to find. To my knowledge, you need to get it from Madeira. But I do think it’s one of the most beautiful threads I know of. They also have Poly Neon and Supertwist and a bevy of embroidery stabilizers.
I have two quilts I’m finishing right now that you’ve been watching me work on. The threads I choose make all the difference in their background effects. Shinier threads will create a shimmer, a wet or wild area. Less shiny threads are more indicative of air or ground. I’m treating them with different threads and patterns to create a specific effect in each case.
For a very wet look, I’ll use Sliver and other flat threads. These really shine across the surface. I prefer them for either starry nights or for water.
The other thread I’m using is Madeira’s bug body thread, FS2/20. This amazing thread has a black core that gives it a very different texture. Zigzagged it does look like bugs. As a stipple it has a sharp look without the intense shine.
I consider both these threads incredibly beautiful and essential. But I use them very differently. Because they create an incredibly different texture. Why is that important? The texture defines the area for our eyes. Shiny thread will create that wet feeling. A sharp undefined metallic does excellent air or dirt, all defined in our thread choices, with no more work to it than that.
Green Heron Hunting is set with water, air, leaf, and ground elements. The air and the ground are very similar. I don’t want a soft look. It’s fall, so I want it to be crisp and textured. So I chose Sliver for my stream. But the ground area with the frogs and the leaf tree tops are stippled zigzag with the FS2/20. There’s a glint of metallic, but it’s different from the high sheen of the water and the eye separates them immediately.
For the air, I chose a driving straight stipple pattern to suggest wind. But I put in a repetitive garnet stitch in it to make it look more driven.
For Fishy Business, the background is all water. So I used Sliver-type threads exclusively. The very shimmery background contrasts highly with the completely poly-embroidered fish. They both shine, but in very different ways.
Your thread choices and stipple patterns define the background. Contrast is the key. If your background and images contrast each other, they will stay visually separate, and help your eye to see the separation.
It happened again. I was sewing along, in the groove, grooving it when I turned over my piece and found I had the wrong bobbin in.
Not just the wrong color. Metallic when I had intended my bird to be soft poly feathers.
There are several things to do at this point. Certainly one is to put your head in your hands and wail. I tried that and it didn’t shift anything. I got out my mustache trimmer, and really looked at it.
The thread was the Madiera bug body metallic (black core) that’s purple, red and green. If it sounds odd, it is. There’s nothing else quite like it. All three shades are the exact value, so you can actually shade with it. The red was a little much, but it added an iridescence to the bird I really liked. I stitched more of it in and decided it a happy accident.
with and without metallic
There are other answers. This would have taken a lot of ripping if it was irredeemable. Enter the mustache trimmer. This is a Wahl Half Pint Travel Trimmer, that is the no-tears-lather for removing zigzag stitching. It’s available at Walmart and Amazon.
Here’s how to use it
I chose not to rip this time. But I’m equipped when I need to. As You Sew so Shall You Rip is about evaluating when you really need to rip and when it’s optional.
Whenever you teach, people want you to give you rules. Directions. Patterns. A safe way to get results.
That’s fair. That’s what they come to class for. What they’d really like is a formula. Add a plus b, divide by six and get your result. I do understand. And underneath it all, I have a list of odd rules as well.
But I do know that they’re odd. They’re based usually on experience. But sometimes they’re annoyingly limiting. And every so often, I test them out. I push the borders, just to see if it’s a superstition I’ve made for myself, or something really helpful. Or if the materials have changed.
This is a process I call gilding the lily. I take a really lovely print or rubbing and accentuate it with thread. I’ve taken to doing it a lot with oil paint stick rubbing.
One of the tricky things is working with metallic, of all sorts. Metallic goes with metallic, right? I used to be quite strict about that.
Until I had something I was embroidering there just wasn’t enough metallic colors for. And then I found my rule was silly. Of course I could dust something with metallic.
So lately I’ve been working with metallic oil stick paint. I’ve been embellishing rubbings with straight stitch and metallic thread, a technique I call Gilding the Lily. Did I have to use metallic thread? I thought so. I thought the poly thread would cover it up too much. I thought it needed the shine.
But I had to work the metallic thread from the top. And metallic thread, even the best metallic thread is touchy in the top of the machine. It goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in your fabric. So I tried it.
How silly of me. I sat down with a pile of rubbings and some beautiful poly neon. The look was different. But lovely. And my rules were so much eye shine.
It’s worth not shutting the doors of creativity because we have a safe sure method, a path we know. Sometimes we simply have to stumble past our safe path to experiment outside those possibilities to something new.
So if I waffled teaching you in class and couldn’t give you a complete formula for a perfect quilt, I hope you understood I’d given you permission to try anything your heart desired. Me too!
One of the hardest things in embroidery work is to get over the match instinct. After years of perfectly matching thread to my project, I’ve had to learn to pick out the highest contrast threads to make an image that really shows up.
In embroidery, contrast is everything. If it all mushes together color-wise then you have a very mushy image indeed. Smooth color exchanges that are analogous and sit next to each other on the color wheel are pretty. But they don’t have much punch. So what you want is color that builds not on similarities but on differences. There are several kind of contrast: color, tone, clarity, and temperature.
Today we’re talking about color ,which is simply the hue. Is it red, blue, or yellow? Or an odd shade of green? It’s not a simple as it looks. There a million reds, blues and yellows and they are not the same.
Thermal shock is about the temperature of a color. Every color, no matter whether it is a cool or warm color, leans either towards having a cool or warm cast. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cool color or a warm color. There are cool yellows, there are hot blues. If all the colors are either cool or warm they’ll flow into each other like analogous colors. But if they’re not? You get thermal shock. Like standing in a cold water sprinkler on a steaming hot day. The effect is kind of visually electric.
Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green is an excellent book discussing thermal variations and how that creates differing colors.
I wanted this fish to jump off the surface and I’d decided on yellow, to give it some definition from the floral like background. But I wanted it showy. So the colors I picked, cool orange, cool and warm yellows, cool and warm blues left it shimmery and gave it impact.
Of course it helps if you have shocking thread to begin with. This particular florescent is a Madeira polyester 40# called Poly Neon. Neon has a around 800 colors of every hue, but it has a select section that really is neon. I went through my collection of those threads and chose my shockers.
fish scales
FaceTail
Each scale on this fish has a blue outer ridge, a purple, and 2 yellows. It’s been shaded in gradations to create the underside separately from the top.
The face and tail are a looser gradation that just shades from darkest/brightest to softer shades.
Here’s a video showing how that’s stitched.
I’ve written a lot about color because it matters to me. Building color in threadwork is done shade by shade, one color on top of another. The eye mixes those colors, which keeps them clear and crisp. But when the colors are fire and ice, prepare to be shocked!
Some things are an experiment. Some things are a quest. Some things are like the holy grail and you keep searching for them interminably.
White is one of those things. When you’re working with thread painting, the easy answer is many shades of grey and then white, or many shades of beige and then white. Both are incredibly boring.
“Why couldn’t you just make it white?“ I hear you say. You could. If you want it to shine out stronger than any other element in the quilt and you don’t care about dimension, you could. Pure white can be like an out of place spotlight in a quilt.
So the quest is, what mix of colors, greys and beiges will make a white that will have good depth, cast and drama. And look like it’s white.
In that quest, I’ve done a step by step photo study on this bird, in hopes to study it.
I’ve talked about zoning and shading before so I won’t flog that in this blog. “Rethinking White” is a post about shading white applique flowers. It’s a bit different than totally building color in thread. Because it’s built on sheers instead of strictly thread. But you may find that a useful difference.
Dimension is made by arranging colors from either dark to light or light to dark. It builds the illusion of shape. The progression of colors creates shade and shadow.
Here is my thread range I chose. It’s a mix of blues, purples, greens greys and beige, laid out dark to light.
I’ve put together some process shots to help explain.
Head Shots
Dimension comes from having a dark, medium and light area in each color zone in your piece. If you can establish dark, medium and light, you can make depth, something that isn’t by nature flat. Then for interest’s sake I added a shocker and a shader color to spark it. Of course the beak and the eye bring it to life.
Changing Cast
The two things you are building are cast and dimension. Cast is the color under the color. Most colors either lead towards the sun or the shade. You get the clearest colors by using only sun or shade colors in an embroidery.
But sometimes clear color isn’t the goal. If you want to come to a neutral shade, you mix both. And try not to go too far from the center. It makes a fabulous blended shade, but it’s hard to accomplish.
The cast on the under feathers was more yellow than the rest of the bird. An over stitched layer of a bluer grey pulls the color closer to center.
White doesn’t have to be boring. Or grey, or beige. With a little thinking and a close eye we can create a blended white with dimension.
We’ve talked a lot about thread choices for one particular piece or another. But when you’re buying thread for a stash, what’s a good strategy? The notion that you need one of everything only works if you’re unbelievably rich. And if you’re faced with a thread chart or a whole display of thread it’s overwhelming anyway. Here’s some ideas about how to think about the threads you’ll really use. And some strategies for buying thread.
There are some threads where I really do need all the colors. I tend to have a whole sliver range because I stipple with it, and I can change the temperature across the piece by changing thread colors. Love that trick! I need all the colors there are.
Range gets defined several ways. Every color should have at least a dark, a medium and a light to shade with. You kind of can’t shade without that. Everything looks flat without.
It comes back to the color wheel. I want a range of everything. This helps check off the boxes. You may prefer darks, or tints or jewels. But it helps to have the wheel in front of you to make sure you have a bit of everything.
But there’s also differences in tone and tint. jewel color is just bright shades. Tone is darkened with black or brown. Tint is lightened. But mixing yellow greens and green yellows with some blue greens gives a more normalized green that is much richer. To get a good range, you want to go much darker, brighter and lighter than the color you want to achieve. I rarely do an embroidery with just light dark medium. It depends on the size. But for a large embroidery, I may use over 80 colors to mix what I want. You can’t use it if you don’t have it.
I put my go-to threads on the list every time. There are things I’m always running out of. Black polyester, FS Madeira 490, Black Supertwist, YLI Candelight Rainbow, certain shades of purple and green I use a lot for binding. If I know I’m going to use it a lot, it will probably trash me to run out of it. And I won’t want to wait for one thread to arrive. Don’t feel bad about ordering an extra spool if you just can’t run out of it. Your list may vary. Pay attention to favorites.
I keep a thread journal. As I run out of a spool of thread, I write down the color number so I can reorder it. I think I can keep that in my head but it really doesn’t work that way.
I make an inventory of whatever thread I’ve got first. When I’m working on a project everything gets garbled. I’ve recently bought a wall thread organizer, not for storage but for arranging threads for a project. But at the end of the day, odd colors go in the wrong bags, and I need to check to see what I’ve really got.
Threads on the right bottom are globbed on.
While I’m doing that, I pull out all the stepped on or smashed threads, almost empty threads, and really old stuff. Old thread is no bargain. It helps to seal thread in a plastic bag, but really old thread just breaks. You can probably use it in the bobbin easier than the top, in a pinch. But it’s not a pet. You don’t owe it anything. Although you can easily use it for globbing. Globbing applies thread in a glob on the surface of your quilt. It makes for beautiful foliage, swamp pond and river bottoms. For instructions on globbing, check out my post, Another Fine Mess: What’s on Your Floor
Bagging thread has another good use. I bag thread by colors mostly. All the blues, pale greens, dark greens, olive greens, reds, oranges, yellow oranges, pinks, purples, greys, teals, get their separate bag. That way I know if I have a range.
About white: Yes. Sometimes I really want white. But most of the time, it’s just too bright for the other colors around it. Instead try pale pastels or greys. White metallic is an exception. It is softer, so it doesn’t have such a high contrast, and that makes it much more usable. Make sure to use a complementary color in that pale mix for shadows. A pink bird probably wants soft green in the coloration.
Remember that colors always are in relationship with each other. The names are a verbal thing, and color is visual. So the names will fail us every time. Look at your colors in relationships with each other and with the background. The background fabric is the color of the light in your piece, so it sets the tone.
Don’t feel bad about having favorites. I love purple, so I buy more purple. I’ll find a way to use it because I love it. I have to make myself buy peach, but that’s ok. I probably have 10 purples to each peach, and that probably will work out in what I ordinarily choose for colors.
Try to pick your colors in decent light. I will do a blog about lighting soon, but you know what I mean. Lighting can change everything.
When I bought thread for students, I made the rule of light dark and medium shades in each color, extra black for outlining, and anything that struck me as marvelous eye candy. It’s not a bad rule. It usually worked. It’s candy without a calorie in sight.
I’ve written a lot about color because I think a lot about color. I It fascinates me, from dye, to fabric to thread. I’ve been working on a batch of mushrooms for some new quilts and I decided to look at the colors through the color wheel just to codify what I was choosing.’
I’m not going to talk about color theory here, precisely. Instead I’m going to talk about relationships in color. Color theory can be deeply and obscurely discussed in millions of ways. I’ve seen it discussed as building blocks, tonal poems, wave lengths and light waves. I’m not sure how much of that is useful. I thought it might be helpful to simplify instead. I’m not dissing color theory. But I am trying to think about it differently.
I’m also not going to use color names. I want you to look at the relationships of the colors instead. But here’s the distinction I find most helpful. Color harmony has to do with how close colors are on the wheel. Contrast has to do with how far away they are. Harmony is of course beautiful. But contrast is what draws our eyes, It is what makes colors pop.
Contrasts come in several style. The colors themselves are their positions on the wheel. Darkened and lightened colors make the tones and tints. Then there is the clear colors. So for fun, sit back, get drunk on the colors and ignore the names. But look where the contrasts and the harmonies are in these color choices.
Notice the range of purples together that create a smooth section of colors and the yellow and greens that contrast. Notice the differences between the dark blues and purples and the lighter yellow and greens. The further distance colors are from each other, the stronger the contrast. The contrast creates the pop.
It’s not as simple as a recipe. It’s not what I was doing. But I did pick full swaths of colors next to each other with a few colors opposite from them. I also actively chose light/dark ranges for harmony and for contrast. It’s not about what we name colors. It’s about their relationship together. The very light green makes the sparkle on this ‘sroom. It looks white. But the green heightens the contrast.
Shading looks different than colors put side by side, but they still meld into each other. The eye blends thread colors that are sitting side by side.
Where are they going? They’re not in place yet, and I’m hoping for smaller frogs to go with, but bright kick ass mushrooms are exactly what I had in mind. I think I’m going to make it rain.
In process forest floor with mushrooms
I’m going to leave you with a small gift here. There are two color wheels here that I made for this blog, one empty and one fully colored. I invite you to use them to chart your own color on a project as you work. Down load them, print them up and use them to see how the colors you use chart up and relate to each other. And let me know what you find. It can be eye opening.
You are welcome to download these two pictures to chart your own colors!
I’m obsessed with thread shading. I want images to be as 3-d as possible. To do that I shade with as many colors as I can. With regular #40 embroidery thread, I can use almost an infinite number of colors to shade an image. Particularly for a larger image. It’s a pretty large paint box. And you can use them all.
With heavy weight bobbin threads, there’s just not that much space in an image to shade. So this is my answer. Instead of adding more and more colors, I dye the thread so that it’s got a range of color within each thread.
Most commercially dyed thread comes in one of two styles. Either they mix a dark color with a number of lighter shades ending in white. Or they do the rainbow either in pastels or brights. The rainbow color ones work for stippling. They don’t shade well at all. The ones with dark to white leave a white area I really don’t like.
Most images can be zoned in dark, medium and light areas. They also can be zoned into different colors, like the spots and the frog’s body.
Dyeing threads to shade images can be set up the same way. You can dye a shader, a shocker and a smoother. The shader thread is the color of your image darker than you want the whole image to be. Add in a dark shading color like dark brown, purple, green or blue, or it’s complement, plus 4-6 dark shades of the whole color. The shocker is a medium range of 5-6 colors with a shocking color mixed into it. Usually a bright complementer color works best as a shocker. The smoother is a color that is a bright highlighter shade that fills in the image and finishes in the shaded image.
The range of colors gives you at least a 15-18 color range in a small bobbin work image. Other colors can be added. There are no rules, but here are some color ranges that work well.
Shader: Dark orange, yellows and reds, and browns
Shocker: Yellows and two purples
Smoother: Yellows and oranges
Shader: Dark purples, blues and greys
Shocker: Medium greys and teals
Smoother: Medium to light purples
Shader: Teals, and oranges
Shocker: Yellows and teals
Smoother: Yellows, and oranges
You get the idea. Dye the thread to do your shading for you.As you fill in the stitching with rhythmic motions, the shading progresses across the image. All you have to do for thread like that is dye for it.
