Friday, April 10, 2009

Faking Holi's Greensleeves


Yesterday I talked about Holi's sleeve and how I planned to add the fresh greens from her over-skirt to the sleeve to make the reds and oranges Pop. I didn't mention that I was out of the Gloriana perle silk I used in the skirt. In order to recreate the overdye on the sleeve I'm going to have to fake it.

Overdyes are easy to fake. I pull as many of the shades in the original overdye as I can find (in this case I used DMC cotton floss for the three shades of green). If you look at the picture you can see I got awfully close to the original colors. I will do diagonal rows of green, switching from the darker green to the medium apple green and then to the lime green just like I did on the skirt. I'll switch the colors after about the same length of thread, too. When I'm done, you guys can vote on how close I got to mimicing the original Gloriana thread.

It is hard to get the subtle shading of some overdyes just right but if you have only a few colors, you can do pretty well. Some of you may remember the Sundance woman in a cloak piece I did oer two years ago. The designer used 8 colors of Watercolours for the clothes. I substituted DMC floss for all 8 skeins and spent 1/3 of what I would have spent on Watercolours, ending up with a pretty good approximation of the model. You can see this piece on the Yahoo 360 blog. Go to the link below if you are at Blogspot, then look for Sundance in the "tag cloud" on the left side column. Click and then scroll down to find "Sundance Beginner's Lesson-The End" to see what DMC can do to imitate Watercolours, or any other overdye, for that matter.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow

2 comments:

NCPat said...

You are already great on the combo....this will look great!

The Chilly Hollow Needlepoint Adventure said...

I hope so, Pat, but remember Color Magic? What looks good in the skein together may not look so good when stitched....