More quilt talk

I'm still quilt scheming. Now that I've chosen a pattern, and come up with some general color ideas, now it's time to find the fabric. I'd like to stick with solids, but would like to throw in a few solids that have a very subtle pattern--like tonal stripes, or maybe a solid with different colored warps and wefts to give extra color depth. I'm fairly sure that I won't find much I like at the local box fabric stores, so I'm looking online. It's so hard to compare colors and really understand what you'll be getting. Just now I came up with a little helpful trick to compare colors from online fabrics. If you have a Mac, you probably have a great little application called Grab (I think there is something similar on PCs as well). This allows you to take a screen shot to save as a TIFF or JPEG, and you can also use it to capture a selection or window. I use this frequently when I want to remember a particular image for later inspiration. Today I used Grab to capture a selection of each fabric I was considering so that I could move them around and compare them to see how they might look in person.

Colors and quilts

I'm on the quilt scheming phase again, and just picked up Denyse Schmidt's lovely Quilts book to help me along. I must admit, as much as I enjoy reading and finding inspiration in books, I'm often reluctant to actually purchase them--too often I feel weighed down by my possessions, and therefore try my best not to add to them unnecessarily. That being said, Denyse's book has some really great quilt designs that are exactly what I was looking for, and just what I need to give me a push in the right direction. I'd recommend checking this book out if you're into more contemporary quilts, and don't know quite how to start.

As I'm planning my theoretical first quilt, I'm trying to decide what colors to choose. I did a little googling to see if there was a good website that would let me play with colors to choose a palette. I found one, and though it's a bit annoying with all the ads, it worked pretty well for me. Click here to see the color palette I'm currently thinking about, inspired by this absolutely gorgeous quilt-in-progress on flickr. square one studio's quilt kind of breaks my heart, I love it so much. But alas, I'll just have to settle for the picture.

Color

A tile from my ceramics days.

How do you pick out colors for your clothing projects? I've been thinking about this a lot lately. As someone who has done a lot of sculpture, I tend to fall in love with shapes, textures, and other structural aspects while color is more of an afterthought. When I did a lot of work in the ceramics studio, for example, I would often dread glazing my artwork. The colors could be unpredictable at times, and I was so nervous that I would ruin all of the hard work I put into sculpting the clay. Now that I've gotten into sewing and knitting clothing for myself, I find that I'm still a bit wary of color. I realized that for my current sweater--Joy, I picked out a color (purple) that I don't have much of in my wardrobe. While in some ways this is a very logical way to choose a color, I think it would make more sense to pick out a color that I know looks great on me. The thing is, I'm not sure I've ever really given much thought to what colors look good on me. I tend to love neutrals, or pseudo-neutral colors. These aren't thrilling to knit with, but would make a much more versatile finished product. I also realized that I was avoiding knitting too many sweaters in the same color, since this seemed like a silly thing to do--but really, who cares? I can have five different gray sweaters--as long as that makes me happy. I've been taking note of the projects I love on Ravelry, and their colors. Often, a simple, plain color can be just the right thing to highlight the lovely lines of a particular pattern. Here are some examples of my recent favorites [ravelry links]:

katiehellon's flair
winterwren's short sleeved tunic
zeitgeistyarns' herringbone sweater
siggasif's gradient
gotiks' silver streak
olgajazzy's camel silk jacket