Backyard Autumn Palettes

Backyard Color Inspiration

 

Autumn Greetings!

This time of year is so beautiful as the trees change their wardrobe and show off their brilliant colors. The changes inspired me to think about fall embroidery. I am frequently asked how I choose colors for my stitching. Often it’s intuition, but I think finding new ways to experiment with color choice is helpful, so I took a walk in my yard to see what inspiration I could find. The trees have only just begun to turn here so I wasn't expecting a lot but I was surprised to find pink in the Autumn Joy Sedum and drying hydrangeas along with reds, oranges, yellows and browns of leaves, berries and seeds.

You can never go wrong with color choices when you let nature take the lead. I looked closely at what I had gathered and used my trusty DMC color card to pull out colors that matched. A note, my color card has actual thread in it, as opposed to printed color patches, so you can see the true color. If you design your own embroidery it is a tool I highly recommend! Even if you don’t, it would still be useful. You can find it here.

Here are a few of my color palettes and their inspirations.

From a distance the fruit on this crabapple branch looks bright red but on examination, it is various shades of orange.

DMC 351, 921, 3052, 3781

Again, from a distance, Yarrow looks so grayed out and dusty, but looking at it closely shows sparkles of vivid yellow.

DMC 320, 472, 726, 3822

Autumn Joy Sedum is the last inspiration. I was surprised that this fuchsia could still be found in the garden. 

DMC 316, 471, 917, 945

I am saving a couple more for the next post, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you are looking for some fall inspired embroidery projects I have two in my shop you might have fun making.

Autumn Trees Pattern

Tis Near Halloween Pattern