True Colors

When I was trying to choose what colors of Perle Cotton would best match the vision in my head of the diamond twill I want to weave, I found myself really struggling with parsing out the true colors on multiple yarn shop websites.  Everyone photographed them a little differently, so it was impossible to tell what you'd get until it was delivered in real life.  And these cones are too heavy and expensive to mess with shipping back the wrong colors.  So it's important to get it right.

I finally decided to order the Perle Cotton sample cards From Yarn Barn of Kansas.  These handy little cards were a good investment in time, money, and heartache saved.   Even here, I had to wait for daylight to properly "read" the colors. 

Here are the color options from Yarn Barn of Kansas for 3/2 Perle Cotton.  These seem a little darker, more muted.

3/2 Color swatches from The Woolery.  They used a much brighter light to photograph these samples.  It has a much different feel than the ones from Yarn Barn higher up the page. Also the texture of the yarns (as if they were balled and not spooled) gives them a chaotic, wormy feel.

Now compare Sapphire Green (left/top) and Wintergreen (right/bottom) from the sample color blocks at Halcyon / Webs. 

From these samples on a computer screen, it looks like the Sap green is much too bright, and that what I'm going for is the wintergreen.

 

   

Here are the Sap Green and Wintergreen sample color blocks from Yarn Barn of Kansas.

Compared to the greens from Halcyon, the Sap Green is still brighter than I would have purchased, while the Wintergreen looks too dark from YBK.

What looked like the perfect green online was in real life too dark.  What I discarded online turned out to be the perfect green in real life!

If you think the greens were hard to parse on a computer screen from all these online shops, the blues were even more difficult.  I thought I wanted Navy, but in real life, that might as well have been black (which is good to know the next time black is out of stock). 

So what colors and I going to purchase for my diamond twill project? 

    

 Sapphire Green and Soldier Blue.

When I twisted the Dark Green and Soldier Blue together, they read as the same value -- Too close.  Some of the other blues were too bright.  So I had to up the brightness on the green to make the color mixing work as I envisioned.  There were several I thought would work.

Another surprise was the grays ...  For another weaving project, I wanted something that would shine like hematite.  By the vendor color charts, I thought charcoal or medium gray would work.  But when I got the real life color cards, I discovered Hummingbird is actually more of what I was looking for.

As a reminder, this is the diamond twill I want to weave with the green and blue.

I also ordered some wool ...  Part of this is an experiment to see how the different materials work "in formation" so to speak.  Will the cotton or the wool work better for a seat cushion?