Variegated embroidery floss. It had to happen.

When I began teaching my Needle Arts class this year to high school students, my intention was originally to keep the embroidery floss selection pretty simple. Since the goal for the first semester was to work a spot sampler with a variety of stitches, I planned on giving the students a rather narrow selection of floss – all regular stranded DMC cotton – in a particular range of colors and shades.

Well, I figured out right away that the color limitation wasn’t going to work. The students had their own ideas about color – what they like, what they don’t like – and I suppose if I had left my floss box at home, we would all have the same color schemes developing on our samplers, despite their likes and dislikes.

I’m glad I took the box in. It’s fun to see the variety of colors the students chose for their own samplers. But hidden in the floss box, unbeknownst to me, were quite a few skeins of variegated embroidery floss. Today, I’ll show you how we dealt with variegated floss, and other ways we discussed controlling color.