Pick your Palette using shade cards

In the video below, I pick a palette of eight shades by matching J&S yarn shade cards against some flowers picked in my garden.

I use a range of criteria for editing my choices down, including

1. prioritising the colours in the inspiration source which are of greatest importance to me (in this case there is a quest to get the right shades of blue/purple to describe the luminous Borage blossoms)...
2. matching the inspiration source continually to the shade cards to keep trying to understand its colours; and
3. tinkering with the palette to ensure I don't end up with a whole range of yarn shades which are too similar in value (that is how dark or light a shade is, rather than its hue...).

I also reflect on many of the lessons learned from a similar set of shades used in an earlier KNITSONIK swatch and discuss the value of keeping our "mistake" knitting as a valuable learning resource to help us build our skills for colour blending in stranded colourwork.

Watch the video through and ask yourself if you would have picked the same, or different, shades; and then apply the ideas to the creation of your own yarn palette - whether using balls of wool; printed out shade cards; or shade-cards proper, the principles are the same.

Once you have created your palette, you are ready for the next stage of the course, which will be launching on October 7th.