A sad engineer’s habit, I’m intrigued by all those conventions, rules, schemes and standards that industries develop as a common language for communication and collaboration. The National Museum of Scotland’s 2022 ‘Design in Colour’ exhibition showed some of Bernat Klein’s ‘colour-box’ panels (see third illustration on the Smow review) and I’m very grateful to curator Lisa Mason for sharing a reference to the Nordic Textile Union’s Barding scheme.
Bernat Klein’s Colour Box
‘Well’, I said … ‘I just like playing with colours’.
Bernat Klein (1965), Eye for Colour
Bernat Klein must have been delighted to find Sven Barding’s textile colour atlas, with a numbering scheme that he could easily extend to catalogue his huge collection of ~5,000 colours.
- Dyed wool samples, specific to textiles.
- Modern, published in 1956.
- Nordic – he very much admired Scandinavian design.
For each hue, Barding’s standard has a 6×6 grid of 20-70% greyness / saturation. Bernat Klein’s colour box extended this to 9×9, or 10-90%, and 63 hues.
Rolf G. Kuehni and Andreas Schwarz, Color Ordered: A Survey of Color Order Systems from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 111.
My own colour box
Here’s my own simple colour-box for the British Wool yarns used in the Sunset Shawl collection, arranged around the Barding colour wheel.
I mostly buy yarns from commercial spinners’ supported stock so find that this way of arranging ‘given’ colours helps to match what I use in each piece and gives the woven collection a balanced overall theme.
Although Bernat Klein used his colour box extensively for design and communication with dyers and printers, Barding’s underlying scheme does not seem to have been widely adopted.
Gouache for ‘virtual sampling’
On a Bernat Klein Foundation workshop called An Eye for Colour with Joanne Yeadon in 2023, we explored blending gouache colours to reproduce subtle natural tones, like those in the human eye.
The big take-away for me was mixing-in complementary colours to control shade and depth.
It turns out even my cheap Hobbycraft set (plus a tube of magenta) is enough to reproduce a commercial yarn palette. This helps to visualise woven pieces and collections before I commit yarn or loom-time.