The other day I went out to the barn for early morning chores. When I opened
the barn doors, I looked through our bare woods and across the neighbor's
field to see the sun coming up. I thought the colors were so lovely: pale
pinks, peaches, purples, blues, greens, grays. I wished I'd brought my
camera.
One of a weaver's many decisions in project planning is color. Sometimes I
know what I want, but often I'm pulling out dozens of yarns to see what color combination inspires me. Sometimes it takes me days and days to decide. What if I had a selection of palettes available from which to
choose? Nature always inspires me, so what if I took photos around the
homestead and used Gimp (my photo editor) to pull out a variety of colors to
make color palettes?
Here are my first ones, using Gimp's color picker and bucket fill tools to create
the palette.
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| January Daybreak |
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January Daybreak color palette
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| January Sunrise |
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| January Sunrise color palette |
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| Winter Evergreens |
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| Winter Evergreens color palette |
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| Pine Cones |
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| Pine Cones color palette |
Of course, more colors could be added for each palette. But I think for weaving, quilting, or knitting, these will work well for choosing color combinations. For the yarns, I have several options. One is that it will help me choose color combinations from my stash. Another would be dyeing my own yarns. I don't feel I need to be exact in my color matching; close enough would be good enough for me.
Being a color person, this exercise is quite fascinating to me and I've been making more to form a collection. I can see them forming seasonal categories. Not sure yet if I'll print them out, although a booklet would be helpful. But to start, I have them here on my blog.
