Color Through the Ages - Chinese Colors

I was having a mental block on color choices for this one --- the examples shown in the instructions didn't resonate with me, somehow, perhaps because of all the Chinese "stuff" we accumulated in Beijing, a lot of which was on white backgrounds and even more of which was almost monochromatic But I started checking out the embroidery pieces we acquired while there and decided to use two of them as my guide for color choice.

First is a Q'ing Dynasty embroidery collar for a child. It was done in colored silk, in satin stitch with a few beads, on various colors of felt. Here is a picture of a segment of that collar showing the embroidery on concentric rings of green and black felt and with beads connecting the rings. MOST of the color you see here is satin stitch in single strands of silk:

Then I pulled a "modern" piece, an embroidered zodiac horse (I'm a water horse in the Chinese zodiac which is why I bought it), done on an even weave in silk, again, in satin stitch (Apologies for the glare off the glass):

In both pieces, notice the dulled down blue, red and green, the bright orange, the pinkish white and the bright yellow. Notice a distinct lack of white (the modern piece has pure white around the eye of the horse but what appears to be white in the collar is really more of a pinkish white, almost a variegated thread). So that's what I aimed for in my thread choices, minimizing yellow because, in Chinese tradition, yellow was reserved for the emperor, and using a gold braid for the cloisonné-like outlining. My color choices were DMC cotton in 725, 798, 970, 3347, 3770 and 3831 and Kreinik #4 braid in 002HL:

So another Color Through the Ages completed...