Using Color Blogs to Create a Bargello Color Scheme

Upated June 12, 2020.
This design was in my 2011 Bargello Club. I used my favorite color blog, design seeds, to create the color scheme. There are lots of lovely color blogs out there, many of which do just what design seed does, show a source picture and then create a color scheme from it.

But going from a color blog to a design isn’t always as easy as it looks. Take a look at these roses in our example scheme from design seed. On the left is the picture, while on the right are the colors selected from it. All well and good, but the samples are all the same size but the colors aren’t the same extent in the picture.

How do you translate it into something like Bargello?

First look at the swatches, do they fall into color groups? Here you could classify it into two groups. One, dividing the swatches into two groups would have two groups of three warm colors for the roses, one corals and one true pinks.

Now look at the picture and think about two things, focal point and extent. You want the colors in the focal point to also be the first colors you notice in the Bargello, so clearly these will be one of the flower colors, I chose the corals.

So my scheme will focus on the rose colors. I’ll need to choose other colors as accents and as background. I chose brown as the background color and because I’m thinking about a line Bargello, I’ll make them dividing lines.

Let’s concentrate on the sets of rose colors. Because the colors are similar, I think I’ll put them all together into one group that will take up several lines. When I do Bargello I often use odd numbers of lines in my main colors and have them reflect around a center line.

I could do this here because the colors are so similar. I could go from light to dark (light coral, coral, dark coral, light coral) or from dark to light (dark coral, coral, light coral, coral, dark coral). Each group would be separated by one line of one of the background colors.

Which of the two I would choose would depend on if I wanted the feeling of being drawn in (light to dark) or drawn out (dark to light). Although I could test stitch both, I’ll begin by laying out the threads and seeing if I prefer one to the other.

Although doing this would be pretty and effective, I wanted tocreate a secondary accent by adding a second color. This is where color schemes come in. The first step is to pick your scheme, i picjed compleentary. Blue-green is the complement of red-orange (coral. So that this motif would be less important, I used only two shades and made the sequence light-dark-light.

By looking at inspiration pictures such as these, thinking about them, and then translating them to threads and the abstract patterns of Bargello, you have an endless source of wonderful pieces. I know, at this point, I have several books of color schemes, and dozens of pictures of schemes saved.