Color Tools — Playing with Color Cards

A smaller set of cards designed to work with a specific product line is the Lunatic Fringe Yarns Playing with Color Cards. They cost $37.50 on the Lunatic Fringe website or can be found at some weaving supply shops.

butter yellow on left; information side of yellow card on right

This is a set of 44 cards that match the 44 colors (including greys) in Lunatic Fringe's Tubular Spectrum™ line of yarns. The cards are a nice large size (3¼ by 5⅛ inches, or 83mm by 130mm) and come in a metal tin with a clear window. There's also a paper insert explaining how to use the tool. That same information can be found here on their website.

The first thing you are likely to notice is some colors have the number 10 and some have the number 5. As the insert explains, Tubular Spectrum is based on the Munsell Color Wheel, which has 5 primary colors and 5 secondary colors, resulting in a 20-color wheel. A color with a "5" is one of the primaries or secondaries, while a "10" is a tertiary, meaning it is at the halfway point between a primary and a secondary.

Each card also has quite a bit of useful information. There is a picture of the cone of yarn. The color is represented in descriptive language as well as a Pantone Color, a RGB color, and a Hex number. The card indicates the value of the color on a value scale. There is a color wheel on each card, although no markings on that to indicate where the color on the card is located on that wheel. The card tells you the complementary colors and the analogous colors in the pack, but does not show them. You'll need to find those cards and pull them out yourself. The back of the card is a solid field of the color.

There are 17 cards that are more complicated colors, mostly tones. They have the same information as the color wheel colors, but they don't have numbers.

There are 7 color cards that cover white, black, and five intermediate grays. Since those don't have complementary and analogous colors, instead they helpfully direct you to other colors with similar values.

Finally, there are 6 value viewing cards. These are gray scale cards with little windows cut out of them. The gray scale is in 20% absorbance steps.

If you are trying to evaluate value in color, this is the tool you need. Unlike most other tools, this tool has both color cards and viewing cards. The value viewing cards are useful for any color situation, even if you are using a different tool.

While this tool does not have the huge range of colors that many tools have, the nice large cards can be manipulated. You can stack and overlap to get a sense of proportion. Information about value is on the cards and you can evaluate value yourself with the gray-scale cards.

If they ever reprint, one thing I would like is a single card with the color wheel on it. That wheel is printed on every card, but the print on it is teeny-tiny. A nice big wheel would help along with something on each card to indicate which slot on the wheel is represented.