The Dressmaker's DIARY
Show your COLOURS
Elisalex de Castro Peake explores colour theory and how we can all benefit from it when choosing what fabric to sew with
With Elisalex
ABOUT ELISALEX
Elisalex is the Head of Design and co-founder of By Hand London, an independent pattern company. It produces gorgeously designed, highquality patterns that are available as PDF downloads through the site www.byhandlondon.com
It’s useful to have a colour wheel on your sewing table or in your handbag when you go fabric shopping
Colour theory is a vast subject, relevant and essential to so many creative disciplines, steeped in history, and loaded with subjective interpretation. While our pages here are limited, I know I’m in the best company to dive into this topic a little deeper, extracting the basics and packaging them up in a way that I hope will be digestible and serve as food for further thought for us as makers.
WHAT IS COLOUR THEORY?
First developed by Sir Isaac Newton in his 1704 book Opticks, colour theory enables us to create a logical structure for the spectrum of colours and thus observe how they interact with each other. We’re all familiar with the colour wheel: 12 hues (fancy name for ‘colours’) based on the primary colours of red, blue and yellow, with secondary and tertiary colours in between that are created when the primaries and secondaries are blended – blue + yellow = green; green + blue = turquoise. The result is a circular rainbow that flows harmoniously as each colour blends into the next.