With Kaffe Fassett's help

Coming up short on yarn quantities is continuing to challenge my ability to squeeze out every last millimeter available. I knew it would be down to the wire with a light blue I've been working and I ended up 1 to 2 strands short (each strand is 36" long, it gets doubled so each working thread is 18" long, the perfect length).

I phoned the company this morning to get the lo down on ordering more yarn. It was a pleasant conversation and the logistics are clear so I'll be keeping track of what I'll need to order. Or will I? . . . 

Another objective for phoning Erhman Tapestry was to see if they produced Kaffe Fassett's "Floral Trellis" needlepoint rug as a kit. I would love to make it, it's quite spectacular, albeit I image a kit for it would cost a pretty penny. Anyhow, I took out his book "Glorious Needlepoint" to make sure I had the correct name of the design. The book is so beautiful and I got lost in it, eventually coming upon this bit in the introduction on designing one's own needlepoints:

It is very important to have quite a few of your colours in crewel weight. This is about one-third the weight of regular tapestry yarn and is used for petit-point and embroidery. Crewel is invaluable when doing subtle shadings, combining two or three colours in each stitch. It is also a life saver when you run out of a colour in full flow, miles from a shop. Just take two similar colours in crewel and you can make an amazing match ...

Well! I remembered the crewel wool I ordered a few months ago in many shades of red, yellow, green, and blue, plus a few browns. So I dug them out and found two shades of blue that when combined 2 stands of one with 1 strand of the other makes a great substitute for the blue that I ran out of! I was so happy about this because I'd been rummaging through all my tapestry yarns from previous projects to see if there was a close matching blue, to no avail.

Brilliant!

The two shades of blue that I used:

And the result, comparing the kit's yarn with my mixed crewel yarn. The right circled light blue is the kit's original yarn, the left circle highlights my 'homemade' mix:

I love Kaffe Fassett! I have several of his books and it's easy to get lost in them for hours.

I will however have to order some yarn because the quantity I am going to need of the dark background is going to be more than what I want to 'make work'. When I pulled the kit out of storage in January, after not working on it for a few years, I discovered some moth damage in the darkest yarn. Not too too bad, but enough that I will have to place an order.