Scarlet Quince Ramblings

Many people tell us, “I like your patterns so much — now if they just didn’t use blended colors!” or “There are 450 DMC colors — why isn’t that enough for you?”

Here’s what happens if you replace the blends in a couple of our patterns with the closest solid colors. The pictures on the left are the actual patterns, with blended colors — the ones on the right are using solid colors only.

Even in these small pictures it’s easy to see major differences. The flower, instead of having a continuum of shades of blue, has bands of obviously different colors. The same thing happens to the owl’s breast and head feathers. The sky, instead of being a deep blue, is just dark gray.

Here are closer views.

The solid-only versions don’t use as many colors, because in both patterns, there were several groups of blended colors that were all replaced by a single solid color. The morning glory dropped from 71 to 54 colors, and the owls dropped from 70 to 41 colors. That’s a lot of subtlety lost, not to mention the fact that many colors in paintings are really not close to ANY solid DMC color. The world is full of drab, dirty, unsaturated colors — not appealing colors for embroidery floss.

We know that many people would rather not stitch with blended colors, and we’ve tried many times for good results with solid colors, but regardless of what the picture is, the results are significantly less good than with blends. Yes, we could make such patterns available anyway, but there are plenty of patterns like that around already, and it just doesn’t seem worth our time or yours.

Another thing we hear frequently is “OK — some blended colors, but this is mostly blends!” We do use solid colors as much as possible, but again, usually they just don’t match very well.

The bottom line: we are really about the results, and sometimes the most worthwhile things are just more work. And maybe not THAT much more work. It’s true that you have to get out two colors instead of one and put them together, but most of the “more work” involved with blends is a matter of attitude. If you’re sitting there going “Grrr, blends, grrr, blends” it’s going to seem like a lot more work. We won’t say “Turn that frown upside down” because that would be super corny, but we WILL say that often attitude is a matter of choice. But as always, stitching should be fun, so if you hate blends and can’t get past that, we’ll be the first to say “Stitch something else.”