…and more yellow

Well, I’ve got most of the new shade of yellow done in Patches, and it looks much more like the effect I had in mind when choosing the original colours – sometimes you just need to see them stitched up to see whether they’ll work as you intended. Time for a sneak preview then; there’s one more (lighter) shade of yellow to come, for the woven bars and filling stitches, and the beads are also a lighter yellow, but here is a glimpse of what it looks like so far (click on the image for a bigger version). By the way, one of the things I’m really enjoying while stitching this is to see the different textures emerge – the Rhodes stitches especially are very tactile and positively demand to be stroked!

Patches texture

Yellows

How annoying colours can be! Doing a version of Patches on hand-dyed fabric (a beautiful rich variegated yellow by Sparklies) I carefully picked two shades of DMC yellow perle to form the basis of the design, and purely by accident found in my stash a lovely shade of Dinky Dyes stranded silk which went with them perfectly.
I stitched the darker shade of perle and the silk and that looked fine, then added the first patch of lighter yellow and it just looked wrong. It’s the exact shade of the lighter yellow in the fabric, but it simply didn’t gel with the rest. Argh!
So I tried a slightly darker yellow to see if there would still be enough contrast, and that fortunately did work. Phew! So unpicked the light yellow and am now steaming ahead, hoping to finish Patches later this week.