In the late spring I feel like I’m surrounded by yellow. Being in the North East of England, everything is a bit delayed in coming into bloom so the daffodils last well past March and the forsythia and pyracanthas also seem to be everywhere. If I venture for a walk down into the nature reserve then a carpet of primroses greets me.

As I was working on my honeysuckle pattern, it took me a long time to find the ‘right’ combinations of yellows and greens to make the embroidery look how I’d imagined it to be in my head.

But honeysuckle (and many other flowers) come in a range of colours and shades. And as a piece of artwork, you don’t have to have the ‘right’ colour unless you are trying to create something photoreal.

In the end I figured out it was the green, not the yellow I’d chosen for the honeysuckle pattern that was throwing off the combination. Whilst I select my colour palette before I start stitching, I find it is only when I stitch the threads next to each other that I can really tell if the colours are working together or not. Sometimes colours that look jarring next to each other can with the addition of other colours sit in harmony. But at other times, there is no rescuing the situation and those stitches need to be cut out and an alternative approach tried.

It was only after I finished stitching the sample of the honeysuckle pattern that I picked up my copy of Colour Confident Stitching by Karen Barbé and realised why the initial combination I’d chosen felt so wrong. It’s a wonderful book for anyone interested in creating their own embroideries and putting together wonderful colour palettes as part of the creative process.

I particularly love these words that she wrote in the introduction as someone with no formal training in art and colour:

“...Colour is a skill that can be learned. It does not matter how many times you feel you have failed in the past when choosing colours. We all have the potential to shine just by learning the process and putting it into practice.”

One thing I have learned in the years since I started embroidering is that colours look different depending on what you surround them with and how much of each colour you use. My Daffodil, Primrose and Honeysuckle patterns all use the same bright and light yellow shade of thread.

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