A lot of people ask me which colors they should get for the shade packs, These are my recommendations on what to buy, and how I like to use the shade packs on my rods.
- You can use Madeira thread to wrap guides, but you must use CP. Since I do not use CP on my guides on the rods I build, I can not recommend using these for wrapping guides. But there are a lot of people who wrap guides with it and love it and have no problems. FITFO and see what works for you.
- If you are just getting into Dec Wraps, order the more popular colors: Red, Orange, Neon Green, Royal, Green, Purple, and Smoke.
- Once you’ve used the shade packs and see their value and how easy it is to make amazing wraps with minimal frustration of figuring out what colors to buy – you will want to order more. You can expand your color choices with some of the “secondary” colors. If you like Blue, there are 5 different packs within this family. Purple has 4, there are a few browns – every color you can think of is contained in one of the shade packs.
- People always wonder which grey they should get. If you only want to use 5 shades, get charcoal. If you want to use white and black, which will give you a 7 color shade – get smoke or grey. IMO the best flow from white to black is Smoke.
- Using the neutral colors to enhance the main color. This is something we learned from James DiCono when he won the May 2012 Wrap Challenge. If you struggle with color selection, you can take almost any shade pack color and combine it with any of the grey shade packs, and hit a home run. Nobody’s favorite color is grey, but nobody dislikes it – so it’s hard to miss using it in your wraps. The same can be done using the Bronze and Cork packs. These are neutral colors and can make a wrap explode off the blank when used properly with another color.
- Super Packs & combining shade pack – The more colors you use in a shade, the better the shade will look. Super Orange + Red is awesome! Pink, Magenta and Purple has been very popular lately. I’ve been combining the Navy and Royal pack since I started using them.
- You can shade light to dark, or dark to light. My preference is light to dark. Even with colors that do not match, ie: Golden olive and Magenta – if you match the intensity of the color through shades you’ll end up with an appealing wrap that does indeed match. That’s what I love about the shade packs, I can take any 3 shade packs and do an In & Out pattern, or a Sparkler – and make it look awesome. So can you.
- Wood Spools – The way I teach how to wrap, is to take each color in a shade pack, and transfer each color to 4 wood spools. Do this for all 5 colors in a shade pack, and you need 20 spools. This allows you to wrap using multiple thread of the same exact color, in bands. This technique is covered in my book.