I want to talk about variegated thread, because it can be so cool in embroidery projects and clearly there are people who don't really know about it.
I posted a photo yesterday of a new embroidery piece and mentioned I'd used variegated thread for it, and a tag on that post was someone saying that they had to look up what it was. I also showed the piece to a friend at work who said she'd seen variegated thread before but hadn't known what people use it for.
So here's my explanation and appeal to more people to try it out for embroidery projects, because it's awesome. Variegated thread is thread that is not uniform in colour. This can be done in a few different ways. Most of the DMC threads in my photo above have a particular colour at varying intensities so it could be lighter or darker but it's still basically the same colour. The range can vary - the lightest and darkest tones of one of the oranges are quite close together, but then one of the browns has a huge differences between the lightest and darkest shades. With these DMC threads, there's a consistent pattern and the colour shifts from one to another in a fairly even way.
The pink thread in the middle is sashiko thread hand-dyed using natural dyes and it has a pleasing non-uniformity to its shade. There's quite a big difference between the lightest and darkest shade of pink along its length, but it's not a regular pattern like the DMC ones - it's a bit more random. I love this thread for floral designs because the shift in shade is very gradual along the length, but it gives a pleasing variation that I think it really effective when sewing something that's meant to look natural. I used this thread for the roses in my Must Brave the Thorns design.
Then there's the rainbow thread at the top of the picture which is dyed multiple colours in a regular pattern and has quite an abrupt shift from one colour to the next. I bought this off etsy and haven't sewn with it yet, but I have Plans for it. I want to use it for a piece with stitched writing where the colour changes along the length of the text to give a rainbow effect. My using thread that's dyed in a rainbow pattern, I can sew a rainbow without having to use six different threads.
You can use variegated thread to sew a design where you want to have some changes in colour or shade without having to figure out exactly when to switch from one colour to the next and have to switch out different threads as you work. You don't have as much control over exactly when the colour changes and by how much as you would if you switched between multiple uniformly dyed threads, but that reduced control is more than made up for by the simplicity with which you can get variety in a section of embroidery using a single thread.
Obviously, you're not going to want variegated thread for every embroidery piece. Sometimes you want that precise control of shade. But I highly recommend having it as an option to consider in your design process because you can have a lot of fun with it.
