July bead soup palette (part 3 & 4)

I never got around to posting the english version of the 3rd july palette on the blog so this will be a "double post". First, though, it's the fourth palette -- you might recognize the the Oliver Twist skein from this post.

For the fibres (Oliver Twist One Offs), I used the colour number on the tag. I've also seen this colour sold as "oil slick" or, like at Perles & Co where I got it, just "blue green". The main colours are jewel tones of blue, green and turquoise with purple and even a few amber/copper accents.

Blue and green hues (including turquoise, petrol, teal etc) usually works great together with copper. And why not, considering it's colours the copper itself can produce, e.g. in the form of verdigris and copper salts. It's also the copper content that gives stones like turquoise, malachite, chrysocolla and azurite their colours. Historically, copper pigments made from minerals like malachite or directly from copper ore were used to make paints like spanskgröna (a.k.a verdegris) and copper-arsenic paints -- hues that in Sweden coined the term giftgrönt, toxic or poisonous green. Copper is also the symbol of the godess of love, Venus/Aphrodite, who was born in the blue-green Mediterranean Sea.

Last week's palette was a little something for those who like pale, pastel hues. I got a bit irritated taking this pic as the light topaz opal beads looked so dark compared to the aragonite in all the photos. IRL they are both light and soft. The aragonite is lighter, but in some of the photos, the opal beads almost looked amber!

This little palette is created using the bicolour focal as a starting point. I chose not to add any more colours apart from the blues and yellows found in the flower bead.


The milky, almost opaque pale yellow aragnoite works very well together with the opal glass beads. I don't often mix stone and glass, but somethings it can be a way of adding a hue to a piece of glass jewellery that you can't find in glass beads. 

As with most complementary colour schemes, this looks the most harmonious if the cold hue, blue, it allowed to dominate, using the yellow as an accent.