Colors in a colorscheme have four qualities (which not an official term btw, but it’s what I’ll use in this guide.) These are Value, Saturation, Hue, and Proportion.

Value (brightness)

Value is a measure of how bright the color is. At 0% value, your color is pure black; at 100% value it’s pure white. Some colors are naturally brighter or darker than others (think about how yellow is a bright color by default, while navy is much darker.)

When thinking about value, you can imagine it like this: if you were to take a black and white photo of your colors, you want every color to be a different and distinct shade of grey. No overlaps!

I think where people make mistakes the most frequently is using several medium-value colors along with one bright or one dark color. Even among your medium brightness colors, you want to make sure that none of them are the same level of brightness. Avoid overlaps in quality, and don’t be afraid to add very-bright or very-dark colors if you don't have any. Contrast is good!

Saturation (intensity)

Saturation is a measure of how ‘intense’ the color is. At 0% saturation, your color is grey; at 100% saturation, your color is eye-searing neon. 

When working with saturation, just like with value, you want a variety: highest saturation, medium, lowest saturation. Very high saturation colors tend to be hard to work with, so if you’re a beginner and want a foolproof colorscheme, avoid neons for now. On the other hand, neutrals (blacks/whites/greys/browns) are called that because they’re lower saturation and they look good with just about everything.

Saturation tends to be the most difficult to ‘see’, and when you’re just starting out, you may look at your crafting supplies and think: I have no idea how to compare intensity here!! My advice is, gather your initial colors, and if they feel off or weird together for some reason, try to find more dull and/or vibrant versions & experiment swapping them around. It might be that (for example) your red and blue were accidentally the same level of saturation, so intensifying the blue or dulling the red helps balance them!

Saturation is also difficult to ‘see’ because it can be hard to distinguish the difference between bright (in intensity) and bright (in value). This requires some eye training and practice to get used to, but over time, as you look at more colors with the intent of understanding saturation, you’ll get the hang of it.

Hue (color family)

Hue describes what the color family is. Red, orange, cyan, etc are all hues. I call them color families because ‘red’ is an umbrella term that covers a variety of pinkish-reds, orangeish-reds, pale reds, deep reds, etc.

When people who are new to color ask about colorschemes, they often end up asking about hues. Can orange go with green? Will red look good with cyan?

Here’s the secret: as long as they aren’t overlapping in quality, any hue can look good with any other hue. What matters is overall balance and personal taste.

Hue works differently from value and saturation, because a colorscheme can use varieties of the exact same hue. (If those are the only colors you use, it’s called a monochrome colorscheme, and it looks great!) The way you avoid clashing with hues is not putting two slightly different hues together.

This is the same principle as “making your blacks/reds match” in fashion. Two hues that are very close, but not exactly the same, can cause a major clash. If you’re going to use different versions of the same color family, make sure they’re either exactly the same hue, or else fairly distant from one another (like a pinky-red with a orange-y red).

Proportion

Proportion is the quality of a colorscheme that, in my opinion, is criminally under-discussed. It’s the part where you decide how much you're going to use each color.

There are lots of websites that will give you color ‘palettes’. They tend to look like this:

However, this isn’t a colorscheme. In order to actually use it, you’d need to decide your proportions. That would look something like this:

Or, in crafting terms: let's use the pink in about 50% of the piece, the white around 30% of the piece, the black in 15% and the teal in 5%.

When thinking about proportion, you want to make sure there’s a good variety of usage. This means you want at least one primary (the most-used color) and at least one accent (the least-used). If you’re using two colors about the same amount and it looks fine, don’t worry about it too much; but if something about your project feels off, check and make sure you’re not using everything the same amount.

Another bendy guideline: it helps to make your accent color high-contrast in one of its qualities (the highest/darkest value, most saturated color, or a different hue from the rest.) Makes it pop!

Those are the four qualities of colorschemes! As a recap:

Value is how bright a color is, and you want to avoid identical value levels.

Saturation is how intense a color is, and you want to avoid identical saturation levels.

Hue is the color family, and identical hues are okay, but you don’t want almost-identical-but-not-quite hues together.

Proportion is how much you use each color, and you want a good variety: generally at least one primary and one accent.

I hope that gives some good guidelines as to how to organize your colorschemes! And remember, at the end of the day, if it looks good, it works. These are just guidelines to help you navigate the color world, or troubleshoot if something looks weird but you don't know why! To finish out, here's two colorschemes that I think are fairly balanced, along with an analysis for each.

Here's the example I gave for proportion. As you can see, we have a primary, secondary, tertiary, and accent color. Our highest value color is the secondary pink-white, and our darkest is the tertiary pink-black. The highest saturation is the accent teal, with second highest the primary pink. The accent pops because it's the only non-pink, non-neutral color here!

This has a primary, two secondaries (the same neutral brown hue in different values), a tertiary and an accent. The highest value is the tertiary pink, while the lowest is the dark brown. The highest saturation is the primary orange, followed by the accent purple; the lowest is both browns.

INTRO

Welcome to Daelf's most involved rambling about old tools so far :D

So, in august, friends who are rarely around were coming to Paris, so we planned a guided group visit of the Arts & Métiers museum (meaning "crafts & professions"— it's all about technology, from the transformation of materials to communication and data, to the purification and precise measurement of scientific elements, to going to space, and also they have a Foucault pendulum and fun vehicles.) Great! We'd never been there!

I loved it from the start, but *then* we got to the first ~textile~ room and OH. MY. GOD. so many semi-automated looms, and strange shuttles, and… ONE spinning wheel? huh. I get closer to it, and it looks… Weird. I am instantly obsessed, but the guide is moving on, so i can't do much about it… YET.

Fast forward a couple weeks. Our son Perco is coming back from summer camp, I have to go pick him up from the train station and then we have to wait for a few hours until Fifo arrives with the car so we can all get home with the *enormous* suitcase and assorted Stuff. … Hey, why not put all that in the lockers at the station, and go to that museum you didn't see because you were away at the time, and yeah, don't worry about the thing i want to see more closely, it's fiiiine :] … i spent like twenty minutes *just* in that room, taking as many pictures as i could, before Perco literally dragged me away because we were running out of time -_-° IT WAS NOT ENOUGH. OBSESSION HAD ONLY INTENSIFIED.

I mean, look at that. what the *heck* is going on.

So, a few days later, having found nothing in the online data about the museum collection, I phoned them to ask about it, ended up exchanging a few mails with the lady curating the Materials section… but her specialty is glass working, not yarn related at all, so she offered to invite me to see the thing *out of its casing* on a day the museum is closed to visitors, and HECK YES PLEASE OMG

It was planned for december 1st, and (sparing you the logistic details) early in the afternoon, I was there with my mom, who had helped me get there with my own spinning wheel.

THE WEIRD WHEEL

sadly, we were not able to take the wheel completly outside, because (as you can see in the first pic above) it's linked to a distaff by a length of combed wool, and the distaff is fastened to the wall, so we were not going to touch that. BUT. no glass.

So.

What is "wrong" with this wheel? "well it has only one pedal…" yes ma'am, but that's. normal, actually ^^° Modern wheels have two because it's more comfy, that's all.

no. it has a tiny bobin that's impossible to take off from the flyer, and in direct contact to the wheel itself, which means no tention adjustment. why.

but also, a very ingenious system, moving the yarn as it is spun so that the bobin is evenly and automatically filled!

in addition to that, there's a yarn swift to the side, with a complicated string-and-pulley mechanism… and between that and the wheel, a missing part, broken. (the vice in the background also seems to do nothing, so there might be a missing part there too.)

so…

… what to make of all this? especially in contrast with the demonstration I did with my own wheel, and all the talking of being able (well, having the *potential ability*…) to make pretty much any yarn I could want with it, it's clear this one was the opposite: make One Specific Yarn, but easily and fast, with All The Steps on One Tool. Not sure how the string and pulley bits worked, but they were a way to use the wheel to spin it instead of the flyer without having to do more than tightening a thing specifically for it. I suggested that the missing part(s) helped with getting the yarn on the swift, and the swift was there because the rigid nature of the 'fill bobin easily with very regular yarn' meant you couldn't fill it much before tension needed adjusting, and everything else meant that you *couldn't adjust tension* because the whole point of this model was predictavility and regularity.

And that's all very cool, but a bit frustrating that the lil blurb under the wheel didn't specify anything but "spinning wheel with yarn swift", dating it even more vaguely to "sometime before 1840". And that was it.

And I realized I'd forgotten to ask the lady to give me the restoration notes she had pulled from the archives, but she had also mentionned something else we (I) could look up…

THE PATENT

At first I was like. Wait. What? But OF COURSE there would be a patent for something weird like this made in the early 19th century! The industrial revolution!! All I'd needed was the suggestion that such a patent existed, and the information that a public archive website listed All Of Them.

So I looked. And came up with nothing about spinning wheels: all the machines were after, like, 1855. But then I realized there was *another* archive, for older patents, from before they were all numbered!

… And I found it.

I FOUND IT.

I haven't had the spoons to read *everything* yet (because, o boi, the cursive, and the *spelling*… it might as well be not-french to me)(yes, if you didn't get it yet, i'm french so the langue itself is not a problem, but. WELP) A few notes though!

I didn't need to read everything to know it's the right one because a/ it has schematics of the flyer (*only* the flyer though :/ ) and the description of the parts describes the motion of the yarn guide doing its work, so even though some parts are not clearly visible or a little different, clearly, this essential part of the machine is THE thing they wanted to file a patent on, and it's the same mechanism I found on the wheel at the musem

b/ at the very start, the authors of the thing explain why they did this, and as I deducted, it's mostly Time. But also saving up fibers and bits of yarn? I get how having one person do everything could save time (they apparently even did Tests, and mention Numbers on how much time was saved) but i don't know enough about the procedures of the time to get how fiber was saved. ah well. It definitely was important, though, because they specifically mention silk in the list of fibers it can be used for!

c/ I had NO idea how incredible it would feel to see a mystery object, have questions about it, get to answer them by looking at it up close (at least closer than a regular visitor of the museum can), discuss it with a professionnal who knew nothing about this specific tool but still A Lot about the textile industry at the time, formulate hypothesis about the Why of the Weird, and then *have them confirmed* by *finding the patent its inventors filed about it because they were super proud of themselves* (quite right, too!)

It was great. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.