A color wheel is a way of organising colors to help understand the relationship between them. The primary colors - red, blue and yellow are spaced out evenly around a circle. Then secondary colors, green, violet and orange which are made by mixing two of the primary colors are added between the primary colours. For example, yellow and blue make green so green sits between yellow and blue on the colour wheel. Next, the tertiary or intermediate colors yellow-green, green-blue, blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange and yellow-orange which are created by mixing a primary color and a secondary color, are added between them. Here is a simple example of a color wheel made from primary, secondary and tertiary colors of DMC Six Strand Embroidery Thread.

Color families are created when you have lighter and darker shades of the same colors. Using color families can help you choose colors to add shading, highlights and color blends to your embroidery. The DMC Thread Colur Cards are arranged in colur families to make it easier to find light, medium and dark tones of a color. To create the color wheel above we used three tones from 12 DMC color families. But with over 600 colors there are lots of other families to explore.

Shades from color families that are next to each other or directly opposite each other on a color wheel will always work well together. We’ve used a peach as the base for all these palettes and have chosen different shades within families that are analogous (next to each other) and direct or complementary (opposite each other).

You can also create a triadic color scheme (three colors that are equally spaced around the wheel.) To find triadic colors try drawing a triangle with three equal sides to connect any three colors on the colour wheel.

We hope you’ll enjoy experimenting with lots of other colors that work well with all the different peach threads and yarns so you can enjoy this trend in 2024.