When there was just the pink and white and yellow, I wasn't sure about the colour. I knew the yellow was too bright, but I had it in my stash and didn't want to go and buy. I also wanted to make the blanket look a bit like a large flower, so a fairly bright yellow in the middle seemed appropriate.
I was amazed when the green was added how it just seemed to lift the whole thing.
Anyway, as I was crocheting this, I was thinking about colour and how I don't feel very confident about choosing colour combinations for projects. I'm quite happy to go with a designer's choice, but I find it really difficult if I want to change things or if I need to choose colours from scratch. This was a bit the case with the blanket, but wanting to use only soft baby yarn, that limited my choice. It was also the case with Gay Ann Rogers's Mystery in a Corner which I ended in adding another colour to half way through.
I do find this particularly frustrating when, quite often, it can be the colour that attracts me to a design. It's so frustrating to make small changes to a design or to design my own piece and find that the colours just don't work the way I want them to.
And when I walk into a shop and look at yarn or floss or fabric, I never seem to be able to find the colours I really want, it always seems to be a compromise. Is it just me and are the shops around here particularly useless? Or is it at least partly the way I look at the colours and the possible combinations?
So I did a little bit of online research, using Ravelry as a starting point, and thought I'd share what I found.
Random stripe generator (for knitters) - www.kissyourshadow.com/stripe_maker.php
COLOURlovers :: Color Trends + Palettes - http://www.colourlovers.com/
kuler - kuler.adobe.com/
Color Wheel - www.quiltopia.com/colorwheel.html
Color Theory Tutorial by Worqx - www.worqx.com/color/index.htm
Color Wizard - Color Scheme Generator - www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp
They all look really useful, and will hopefully help me feel that I do know what I'm doing!
Here are some of the gorgeously colourful pics by other talented people I've found recently on Flickr.
