Color Theory
with Maurice Brassard Cotton

Learn how colors work together, using Maurice Brassard yarn colors as your guide.

Color relationships, explained in yarn

Choosing yarn colors is one of the best parts of weaving, one of the easiest places to second-guess yourself, and sometimes one of the most challenging. With 81 Maurice Brassard colors to pick from, it helps to have a starting point.

What is the color wheel?

Outlined = primary

Colors sit in a circle so you can see how they relate. The primary colors are red, yellow and blue. Mixing two makes a secondary: orange, green and violet. The six in between, such as red-orange and blue-green, make 12 families.

Whites, creams, grays, browns and black are neutrals. With little or no color of their own they sit off the wheel, but they go with everything and matter for value (light and dark).

In the lessons that follow, we will explore complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary and tetradic relationships, plus warm and cool, and value.

Tap a color
to begin
 

How to use it

  • Tap a color you love, or one on your shelf.
  • See how other Maurice Brassard colors relate to it.
  • Check value so stripes stay clear in the cloth.

Where it helps in your weaving

  • Planning warp stripes and choosing a weft that works with them
  • Building a palette for towels, scarves, blankets and other projects
  • Deciding between a bold pairing and a quiet one before you wind a warp

Good to know

Where warp and weft cross, the colors blend in the eye, so a pairing can look different in cloth than it does side by side. Use this page as a guideline to get started and to see some options, not as a set of rules. Your own eye is the final judge.

Using this page

Each lesson shows up to three Maurice Brassard options for your color. Open the family lists to browse every color in that family, and tap Back to Color Wheel to start again with a different color. You will find the neutrals in the Value Contrast lesson.

A note on color

The colors on this page are digital approximations, a best estimate of the Maurice Brassard shades, and monitors and phones all display color a little differently. This is a guideline to help you get started and see some options. As always, we highly recommend the Maurice Brassard Cotton Color Card so you can see actual samples of all 81 colors in hand.

A note on color

The colors on this page are digital approximations, a best estimate of the Maurice Brassard shades, and monitors and phones all display color a little differently. This is a guideline to help you get started and see some options. As always, we highly recommend the Maurice Brassard Cotton Color Card so you can see actual samples of all 81 colors in hand.