Sometimes a new set of colours seems to call out to you, and once noticed, appear in different guises. Today I'm talking about ways of finding colour to play with. First is this snap shot of Choke Berries I took while travelling in Colorado with some friends earlier this year. The mix of vibrant Autumn reds set against the cool dark greys in the background caught my eye.
Next came the 'Oh I have to have that!' purchase when I received an email from one of my favourite stores https://onehundredstars.co.uk/ I love their mini kimonos, have several, but this orange Chrysanthemum print on a slate grey ground just resonated with my current colour love.
You can see that the next piece of loveliness was finding a company that will wind an ombre yarn to your specification AND include a cute stitch holder to match. Find them at https://yarn4you.co.uk and yes they are happy to ship overseas. This was one of their colour mixes called 'Mountain Ash' which struck me as serendipitous as this little colour journey had started in the mountains of Colorado.
Time to knit, but when the yarn arrived, the orange in the yarn was a little too pink, so as I knitted I added a strand of mustard colour mohair, just enough to give the orange a little hint of tangerine. As the ombre progressed, I added a dark purple mohair strand as the orange darkened. Finally, to get a bit more slate to the khaki colour transition, I added a strand of dark teal mohair.
The shawl is now the perfect accessory for the new kimono. For the knitters among you, The pattern is the basic shawl; work a 'yarn over' increase once at each end and twice in the middle on the knit side, to get the triangular shape. In between I worked a mix of eyelet rows, stocking stitch and a row of cable over six stitches with three in between. This I discovered gave a wavy line, and reminded me of the leaf shapes in my first picture of the Choke berries.
So what has this to do with designing beadwork? It's a starting point, this process of taking photo's, playing with fabrics and yarns is how I find a new colour combination. The more variations of it I spot, the more I get to understand how and why it works, and then I can bring that to the beads when it's time to pick out a new colourway.