Choosing a colour scheme for your next project can be difficult and time consuming, especially when like me, you love lots of colours. Putting together a bundle of different colours can be quite tricky!

This won’t come as a surprise to many of you that I like to visit Lucy’s Attic24 blog for inspiration, she has a wonderful knack of just putting the right colours together. Although I am sure it doesn’t happen quite like that and she does play around with colours until she settles on a palette and order of shades. I particularly love how she uses pegs wrapped in yarn to decide on a colour scheme.

But it was this particular post that got me thinking … Lucy’s walk gathering nature inspired her autumn blanket last year and she posted a photo of her gorgeous pickings (see below).  It was the photograph below that gave me that light bulb moment ….. photographs can be your colour palette inspiration.

And this leads me onto some alternative methods to choosing colour schemes. There is a wonderful website called Design Seeds and if you haven’t ever visited this website then do.  It’s a fantastic accumulation of 100’s of different colour palettes. Jessica set up Design Seeds and just like Lucy she is influenced by flowers, crops, produce, and the countryside. For each colour scheme there is a photograph that is the influence behind the scheme. Take a look at her website and see which colour scheme you like.  The next step would be then to choose the yarn shades closest to those colours and then voilà you have a lovely colour scheme that all works well together. Another similar website I came across is Color Palettes the principal is the same and you can search by colour too.

I am now looking at everything differently; what else could inspire a colour scheme? Last week I walked past this cute camper van with these retro 60’s curtain (the curtains even matched the orange camper van love a bit of co-ordination). What do you think? Could the colours on the curtains be a colour scheme for a blanket?

I would love some of my own personal photos to inspire a blanket’s colour scheme. But how? Well folks I found this magic tool that helps you pick out the shades from your photos and present you with an awesome colour scheme. Check out my results, I am hooked and spent far too long playing around with it.

Lets start off with that photo above …

You see those little white dots? Well those are the colours the software picked out. Now I love this because if I had to choose the colours myself I wouldn’t have thought to include some of the beiges or the greys at all and the colours combined do work but to be honest its not inspiring me right now. But its a lovely palette for a blanket one day.

How about a photo on that is on Tea & Crafting’s homepage? Check out the results from that – pretty neat huh?

Yes I am getting addicted to this. So I thought I would test out an actual photo of people – here is a selfie of Jasper and I and it worked, I love the results. I am officially hooked! This is a lovely muted wintery palette for a baby boys blanket I have on my list to crochet. I will probably change the order of the colours but I like it as as base to start from. Now I just have to hunt for some yarn in similar shades.

So if you want to test this out head on over to the Play Crafts website here and have some fun with their Palette Builder Tool.

But if you don’t have time to play with the builder and then find the yarn (which can be tricky) then have a look at pre-made packs  such as The Homemakery’s Yarn Packs. This one in particular is one of my favourites inspired by Orla Keily.

And finally my other go to for choosing colour schemes is looking at the selvedge of fabrics. Ever noticed those coloured circles that pick out the colours of the pattern on the fabric? Looks at those circles for some inspiration and ideas.

There you go – this is a long post but I hope it’s given you some useful information and that it will indeed be useful to you in choosing you next colour scheme.

Are there any other things you have found inspiration from when embarking on your next knitted or crochet blanket?

The post Choosing a Colour Scheme appeared first on Tea and Crafting.