Diversity plays an important role in my daily life. However, I had not yet shown this through my craft projects. Upon realizing this, I decided I needed to show diversity in my cross stitching projects. I always used the colors from the pattern. Mostly because did I naively did not stop to think about it and partly because it can be a bit daunting for me to change the colors of a pattern.
Changing the color combinations of a cross stitch pattern
I have amended the colors in a pattern before, by for example changing the color of the dress. But I did this by using another pattern. For example, by finding another pattern that had a dress in the colors I wanted. Because often times there are some many colors in a pattern, the differences in all the different colors are very subtle. This makes it more difficult for me to combine colors on my own. Holding the threads together to see if they match doesn’t quite cover it, the combination in the end result can still look different.
Finding different color combinations for for example dresses or flower is quite easy. There are so many other patterns that cover this. However, when I had decided I wanted to cross stitch a black Cinderella, I realized that I did not have another pattern in which the figures had dark skin tones.
A guide for skin and hair color combinations
So of course I went to Google to find an solution for this. The term I searched was ‘cross stitch skin tones’. The first result was a direct hit! Lord Libidan has made a very useful visual guide on which colors match. This is important, since most of the times there are about 3 or 4 different colors when you want to cross stitch a face for example. Not only do they have a color guide for skin tones, they’ve also made one for hair tones. How amazing is that?
I used this guide to find the right colors for my Soda Stitch ‘Cinderella’ project.
What do you think of the end result? How do you create diversity in your cross stitching?
