Blends. What is it? How to do and where to use?
Today we have prepared for you another educational issue on the topic of cross-stitch for beginners. And the topic of today’s article will be blends. Very often, at the sight of such an element in a ready-made kit or a pattern, novice embroiderers get scared, preferring to choose what they already know.
In fact, there is nothing difficult and scary about blends, it’s easy to make them, but the result can be impressive.
What is blends?
So what is this element. To begin with, it is worth paying attention to the meaning and translation of this word. Then everything immediately becomes clear.
Words meaning
This term came from the English word blend, which means mix.
As it is easy to guess now, a blend is just a mixture of threads of different colors for some symbol in embroidery. If we consider that embroidery is usually done in two threads of the same color, (for example, brown), then the blend is the same thread in two threads, but one of them will be brown, and the second will be light brown.

When and how to use blends
Blends are usually used in two cases:
- When you need to get an intermediate shade (for example, between dark brown and light brown), thereby making a smooth transition from one color to another. Something like blurring the borders between colors.
- Or when you need to achieve some special effect.
- And if in the first case the blend can still be replaced with a color from the manufacturer’s palette, then in the second case it is simply impossible to do without a blend.
As you see, blends is a quite simple element.