The New Year in Wholesale Color

Color-Aid Paper

These examples are arranged in an adjacent or analogous color scheme. The C-A Paper is strictly controlled so that these hues are the correct ones for a color wheel.

Color-Aid Paper

It comes in about 250 colors with the hues, their tints and shades, other colors such as cyan and magenta, and a whole list of white, many grays, and black.

This color scheme is analogous with one complement.

The orange second from the bottom is not Color-Aid.

Lavender Collage

No two people can actually agree on which of the above colors is lavender. This is the reason for the strictly controlled C-A Papers and for the short list of color or hue words. The eleven hue words? red, green, blue, yellow, orange, violet, brown, pink, black, white, and gray.

At the beginning of this new year, I am starting something new. I have opened two wholesale accounts with embroidery supply companies. I worried and worried about it for several months before I was ready to dip my toe. But the reality is much easier than the long-drawn-out agitation of anticipation. But most of it turned out to be instantaneous. Easy-peasy. But let me hasten to add that I have opened small accounts for small orders. I do not have a resale license, but I do have a NM VAT number for artists. That was enough to convince both Wichelt Fabrics and Rainbow Galleries to let me make minimum orders for my classes. So now I can order fabric and silk thread for Intense Pattern, my new blackwork class.

My next area of endeavor is to get Color-Aid Papers to sell to me wholesale in small quantities. Hopefully they will accept my VAT number. That is Value Added Tax that allows artists to charge and collect taxes on their finished products. I know, I know--I didn’t want to know that much about the underside of the embroidery business either. I hope to be able to order the papers for my new color class, Pirate’s Gold, for the EGA National Seminar in San Francisco this September. Carole Rinard and I can also use it to buy paper for our ICC Rainbows Bend when this current order (by Carole who paid retail) runs out (if it runs out--depending on how many people want to take the ICC).

Today was one of the regular stitch-ins for Sandia Mountains Chapter. As usual we transact and talk about guild business for at least half of the conversation. It is a good way to put people in the know, to sound out opinions, to get advice. All of us at the meeting are officers or had been good volunteers in the past. We also talked about the origin of the two phrases: jury-rigged and jerry-rigged. Our conversations do wander far and wide. Ask Cindy Brueck for the etymology and definitions of the two. She knows!

When I told everyone at the meeting that I had finally gotten wholesale orders in for the blackwork class, only the people who were taking the class were impressed. All that worrying and wheezing about getting big companies to sell small amounts wholesale went unannounced, unacknowledged, and deeply ignored. That will teach me!