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So I bought a new kit to do for a friend who loves frogs and I was so excited about it until I opened it and found *gasp* ... it has blended threads. Which I have never ever done before I'm sorry to admit.

So any advice from those of you who have experience with this kind of thing? It is really just as simple as one thread of one color and another thread of another color and stitch like normal, or is there more to it?

No, it's really that simple -- one thread of each color. The only real considerations are that you can't loop start (make friends with waste knots or away knots) and be fastidious about not twisting the threads.The two threads need to lay flat in order for the 'blend' to work. Other than that, it's just like stitching without blends.

The only real difference I find is in organizing my project. I put the two colors together in a floss-away bag (or on a bobbin if you're a bobbin person) and mark it with its symbol rather than just mark the bags with the color number.

If the two colors are close, the stitch will blend right before your eyes. If the two colors are quite different, the stitch will look very tweedy when you look at it inches from your face as we do when we're stitching it, but when you step back to viewing distance, the eye will do the blend.

I do a lot of stitching with blended threads on the models I do. The main thing I make sure to do is to railroad the stitches. When I go to put my needle down thru the fabric to finish the thread, I put the needle between the threads to separate them as ?I finish the stitch so the colors lie next to each other instead of on top of each other.

Yes, indeed, it really is that simple. And the results are stunning, creating whole different colours. The Gothic Splendour stained glass window design in my rotation uses only blends, but with a twist: one of the colours is variegated and one solid. It's wonderful -- you never quite know what you are going to get.

It looked like with this particular kit I don't know if they didn't have a color or didn't want to put another color in there... It's a picture of 3 different tree frogs, one green, one purple, one orange, and I noticed when sorting the floss that there was 3 shades of orange and 3 shades of purple, but only 2 shades of green, so the blended color is part of the shading on that last frog I guess.

Thanks for the advice... does anyone know a good tutorial on railroading? I think I just need to see a picture or two to better visualize it in my mind. A quick Google search brought me to one on about.com, but I really don't like their cross stitch tutorials because they always seem to make it more complicated than it needs to be...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY00Smy_Zok" target="_blank 7u it's around the 3 min mark. There' could be better ones, but I did a quick search and found that on railroading on youtube.

I agree with all the others have said about blended threads. I just finished a project that used them for the skirt and the result is fab. I put my blends on a separate bobbin for each one with the symbol on it. That way I didn't have to keep finding separate threads. The colours I used as blends were also used invidually so could have been confusing. Blending threads give so many variations of colours.