keeping some poison in your color scheme

Yesterday I volunteered with the Louisville chapter of the Embroiderers' Guild of America at the Textiles exhibit of the Kentucky State Fair.  Members brought their projects to the exhibit and "demonstrated" their techniques by working on them while people could come by and watch and ask questions.  It was great fun.

One of the other women demonstrating while I was there is something of an expert in color design, an area that is my weakest link in my lacemaking.  So I picked her brain and learned some really important principles of color design that, I think, have some metaphorical implications (although I'm not yet sure what those might be).

I'm making a huge Romanian Point Lace mat with six butterflies surrounding a bobbin-lace center.  I wish I could upload a picture of it in progress, but at this moment I'm without a camera and I don't know how to upload from my phone -- so bear with me, please.

Now, I've made each butterfly's outline in a different color, in shades of blue, red, and purple.  The background is ecru, or a light beige. Now, my tutor told me that the first principle of color design is to provide places for the viewer's eye to focus and then to move about the piece easily.  I guess I'd realized something like this when I first got started with the piece, because just seeing those six different colors starkly outlined against the white of my pattern really was jarring.  So I had decided to fill in each butterfly with the same pattern, using a variety of colors and lace stitches.  My thinking was that this unified patterning of the filled-in areas would pull the piece together.  My instructor yesterday told me that I was on the right track with that plan.  I used a bright yellow in one spot on each butterfly, and she said that the pop of bright color gave the eye a focus place in each butterfly, and that was good.  So, I was following the first principle of color design with that.

I also have a place in two of the butterflies where there's some distortion that has crept in making some areas of those butterflies larger than those same spots are in the other butterflies -- this distortion is caused by my need to have sort of stretched these areas a bit to make the lace pattern lie flat.  So in that spot in all the butterflies I used a very light, airy lace stitch and chose colors a few shades lighter than the structural outline of each of the butterflies.  My thinking was that this strategy would minimize the appearance of those areas so that the distorted areas would not jump out at the viewer.  Again, my tutor said I was exactly on track in my thinking and that I have been successful in using color to sort of correct for an error.

So far, I was two for two, but the next point is where the problem really was, I thought, in my design.  I have been using colored threads that I just have left over from other projects, and I've been fitting them in sort of willy-nilly.  Some of the colors look pretty good in one or two of the butterflies and less good in the others.  But there is one color that I LOVE -- it's sort of a seagreen -- when I see it out on its own, but I think it really looks terrible inside each butterfly.  I've not given it a very big space to fill, but to me it sort of stands out because it's such a disappointment placed next to each of the blues, purples and reds of the structural colors.  I was thinking I should just cut that seagreen out and substitute something else.

BUT NO, my instructor explained that this seagreen functions as "the poison" in my piece and that every color design needs a spot of poison.  "It helps to pull everything else together and solidifies the rest of your design so that your viewer knows what you're doing with the whole."  Who knew?  She said that the poison cannot take up much area in the design or it really will poison the design, but just a spot of poison is a good thing.

So, she said to leave the seagreen in and that as I complete the rest of the piece it will look like it carries less of the color within the piece and will really help the piece.  Now -- this idea of a bit of poison seems to me like it has the possibility for some kind of metaphorical meaning, perhaps a lesson to teach beyond the bonds of a lace mat................................but I don't know what that might be.  I plan to keep thinking about it as I finish the mat (the thing is so big that to be honest, I'm hoping to get it done by next year's State Fair so I can submit it in some category for exhibit).  I don't want to jump to the obvious possibilities...........we'll see.

Anyway, my teacher gave me additional advice about "mirroring" within each butterfly so that at some small level at least the upper wings and lower wings of each butterfly mirror each other -- again to provide a path for the eye, but another possibility for metaphor.........................And my teacher recommended that I could use some colors just in the top wing and others in the bottom wing, but that most of the colors can match.

Finally, she was so horrified at the pure whiteness of my pattern showing through around the edges and within the mat that, although the pattern will be gone when the piece is completed, she said that seeing the white was giving me trouble visualizing the finished piece because white pulls color out of a piece.  Again, WHO KNEW?  I LOVE the color white and am actually planning on making white lace curtains for my living room as my next project.  I have white trim..............I figure, why not?  Well, that's a story for another day, but I have to admit that I had originally planned to use white rather than ecru as the background color for the mat, but fortunately my sister talked me out of that idea.

When thinking about allegory or metaphor that could be found in this effort at color design, the one thing I can say WITH CONFIDENCE that for me, listening to the advice of my sister is ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA.   Confirmed here!!!!