For some embroidery or cross stitch patterns, it’s normal to want to change some colours (say of a girl’s hair, or a dress, etc). Changing colours is not as simple as it can seem at first, so below is a video tutorial with some tips and tricks to make sure you end up with a finished project you’re happy with. 🙂
First up, do not attempt this on a massive full coverage pattern, there are often dozens of colours making up any element. So, it would be near impossible to do substitutions on anything but the smallest of elements.
As an example for the video tutorial, I’m using the “The Struggle is Real” pattern. Let’s say you want to change the colour of the red blanket to blue. First, you’d look at your pattern and see how many colours are in the blanket. In this pattern it’s quite simple, there are only two shades of red.
Ideally, you have a copy of DMC’s floss colour card (or a colour chart of whatever floss you’re using). You “can” use a printed version, but the real floss version is much better. You can order this direct from DMC, or from many needlework retailers (they may have to order it in). Here’s a link to the DMC real floss chart. If you don’t have a colour card, you could do a similar substitution using your stash, or going to your local needlework shop and selecting from the bins of floss directly.
For each tone in the original pattern, you’ll need to find a similar tone in the new colour. For example, in this pattern there’s a dark red and a darker red. So if you wanted to switch to blue, you could use a dark blue and a darker blue (or light and medium, etc). Try to keep the differences between the tones as similar as possible, you can see that 350 and 349 are right next to each other on the DMC floss card. So don’t choose two colours that are quite far apart (like a light and a dark blue, the pattern won’t stitch up well and may look a little odd). The floss card does group colours together in colour families (similar hues such as orange-reds, pinkish red, purplish reds, etc), so choosing your new colours from the same colour family will help them be cohesive. That’s not a hard and fast rule though, but it will help the tones blend together better.
It’s advised to not substitute an element in a design if it has more than 5 colours, it would be quite hard to get all the new colours blending well. You may have to change out colours as you work if the design looks a little funky as you stitch if you’re switching out a lot of colours. 🙂
Tips on changing out colours
- Only attempt to switch colours on elements that have five or less colours — more could become quite complex and throw off the design
- Using a colour card is ideal, but if you don’t have one you can do your best with your stash or the selection at your local needlework shop
- Try to keep the tones balanced with the alternates, and keeping tones in the same colour family is preferable.
7 Responses
Louise
Sorry dog
Najathi
I’m going to make a rose cross stitch but i don’t know how to change the color pink to white and keep the shade right?
Dana Batho
I explained everything in the tutorial Najathi, you’ll just have to try it and see how it comes out. 😊
Maz
I have completed the Mighty samurai. I have now reversed pattern so he is looking opposite way. How do I change the reds to blues and the purples to greens and keep the shading right
Dana Batho
Hi Maz! I explain it in the tutorial, you’ll have to try and find similar tones in the colours you want to switch to (like a light blue for a light red, etc). I don’t know the pattern as it’s not my design, but if there are more than 2-3 shades of each colour then it’s near impossible to switch out colours like I explained, as often more detailed shading consists of so many colours other than the main colours (like there might be brown or blue or purple in the shaded areas of the red section, for example). So if it’s a complex pattern, you’ll either have to leave the colours as they are charted, or risk it looking like a complete hot mess when you switch out the colours (if you can figure it out at all). Switching out colours is always going to be a risk, designers design and choose colours with the entire design in mind, so they balance each other and allow your eye to flow around the design well. Changing the colours can really mess with that, and just end up making a piece look quite odd, and unsettling to look at. Hope that helps! 🙂
Louise
I want to change a birth sampler a gog from browns to blacks to make it personnel how many shades of black could I use and putting greys would this help
Dana Batho
You’ll have to see how many shades are in the original pattern, and try and get the same “value” of colour and temperature as the original colours or it’ll look weird. Value is how dark or light something is, like is it the lightest light, the darkest dark, a midtone, etc. Temperature is warm or cool, like a bluish-red is cooler than a more orangey-red (all colour has temperature, even greys, it just might be harder to pick up). So if you don’t have a floss colour chart then look at one online, you want colours that are all close to each other in the “strips” because they’re all the same colour family, different tones of a similar temperature colour. Like one strip of purples will be a cooler more royal purple, and another strip might be a warmer more magenta/maroon colour. Hope that makes sense. 😊