02.1_Palettes_04_V1.mp4

So for the last example, I'm going to use some little flowers that I picked in the garden. So we have got Borage and Yarrow... Little piece of Meadowsweet, there. This is a linen... it's like a Flax flower. Like this lovely fresh blue and white and cream palette. We're going to be using the, the actual shade cards. So, last time we used photos of the shade cards cut up, but this time we're going to pick a palette from this final inspiration... So, some little plants from the garden, and we're going to use the actual shade cards. I'm going to get a piece of scrap card left over from what we just did a minute ago. And I'm just going to go along here with my hole punch. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I think we've got it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. It's great. Doesn't have to be a work of art - it's just so we've got something that we can tie little bits of yarn onto. I'm using all the way through this course, and for all my stranded colourwork, Jamieson & Smith, 2 ply Jumper Weight. Just because I love this yarn, the more I work with it, the more I want to do with it. Each time it's a bit, for me, a bit like settling in for a cup of tea with really good old friends. And I just... This is the yarn that I've used and it's the one I'm going to carry on using because I just get so much out of it. Again, we'll do a quick matching up just to see - this is the sort of reds and pinks. And as I hold that up, we're not seeing anything that jumps out as immediately matching../ The browns and and hot reds - warm, kind of brick colours. No, not so much. This is looking promising. The purple, purple end of things here. And some of these blues also might be useful. So let's keep those there. I guess the white is going to be important for the Meadowsweet, so we'll put that on the top there. And then the Greens, of course. And again, the yellows may be a little bit useful for the Meadowsweet. I'm just going to start pulling out... What's the really obvious? Definite "yes, that's the colour of the inspiration source". And I'm looking and thinking about this little Borage flower here. So beautiful. And I'm thinking like, this is pretty good. 131 is pretty good. And then I know there's a very similar colour - FC37 - FC37 is similar but it's a bit more bluey. So I think we might go with 131. And then looking at the really darkest parts of the flower. And again, if you look really closely at this beautiful little linen flower, you can see it's got these darker parts on it. I think that actually 20, although it looks very dark next to it... I think it's going to be good to have some of that, although actually looking again, maybe the darker parts are more like FC56... and Again, holding it up to the inspiration source as well... I think that might be the best option for the darker bits. I'm going to take this and I'm going to write 131 and FC56, and I'm going to just carefully extract one strand of each one of those colours. And this is a nice, non-destructive way... It's fiddly and time-consuming. But if you haven't got access to balls of yarn, but you have got a shade card, this is a good way to get a rough approximation of what these yarns are going to be like. So you're making a little mini shade card just as a handy little reference for yourself while you're putting your palette together. Yes. When you hold that next to that. You can see that there's that sort of lovely bluey purple harmony that is going on in the flower... so I've extracted one little piece. Like I said, it's a bit fiddly, but it is a nice way to explore how the colours are going to look next to each other. So there's those purply blue colours. Do you see them? And - yeah - we want something that speaks to the really the light, the lighter parts of the flower. Either FC15 or possibly 14 and then if we were going to go more in a more purply direction, FC9 and/or FC51. FC9 is very, very close to FC56. Let's see the flower next to it again. I think that's better. I think that's a more accurate... True to the inspiration source colour than this. These blues just look a bit too cold and a bit too kind of turquoisey. I think. That's decided it. We're going to go FC9. That's kind of the bluey purply colours down, now. I don't think we can do very much more with those because remember, we're trying to stick to a limitation of eight rather than pulling out every single colour. A lot of this process is just about managing overwhelm, making sure things don't get overwhelming. You know, limiting the amount of colours is a good way to, to do that. There, we've got some nice bluey purply colours. And you see, those are just speaking so nicely to that little Borage flower. We also need some greens. That's where this really comes into its own. Yes. And you can see straight away: 1280. Do you see the fuzziness that's all around the edges of the Borage leaf? That's kind of there as well. Nearly any of those greens will work. And this is an issue with nature... Is that nature has millions of colours. If you pick a landscape or if you pick a flower or even if you pick something like, I don't know, like a bowl of peaches, there's so many different colours, it can become a little bit overwhelming. And it's one of the reasons why picking a print like the tin or the map can help because there's already been an edit on the rich complexity of the world we live in, whereas with nature you're working with the raw stuff and then you've got like all the colours to kind of contend with. One of the reasons that I really wanted to pick these kind of blue flowers is because it's slightly my nemesis, when I was working on this swatch, looking at My Street, you can see I picked this palette and you can see there's a couple of bits of the swatch - like this, very similar colours to what I've got here - I've got blues and greens and you can see all the greens that are here in the swatch and all the blues that are here in the swatch are also here in this Borage flower that speaks to it quite nicely. But. There's a big but! I didn't get enough contrast between my background and my pattern when I was working on this, and I never managed to satisfactorily show the beautiful little blue flowers popping out against the green background, which is what I wanted to show. So I'm going to be very mindful. And this is why you should always keep your swatches, because they're such a useful source of knowledge as you build up your your understanding of how colours interact with each other. So when I picked the palette for this, I didn't know then what I know now. And now when I'm picking out the palette for this, I can be really intentional about making sure that I think carefully about the contrast between my bluey pinky, purplish colours, and my greens. If we squint, they're not the darkest colours, but they're not the lightest. Just to understand the values a little bit, I wonder if going for the lighter colours, like maybe FC24 or even - I'm looking at 1280, which is a really interesting colour because it's got green in it, but it's also got purple in it and it's also got cream in it - What I want to see ...This is why. You can use the shade card, you can kind of pull, pull the strands next to each other to see "are those both light. Are they both going to read as light colours"? And you can see that if I fold them there over my fingers. Excuse me, because it's so tiny! That is quite light. And I think - if we hold these over it, - I think we're going to get good contrast there. And all of this is guessing because you won't know how it works until you start actually knitting with the colours. It's a glorious experiment, but let's say those are going to be... Those are going to work. So I'm going to put that FC24 and 1280. And then I can see I've only got three more holes here! You can see what I'm doing. I'm just carefully extracting one strand from that knot and if they both come out, that's fine. You can just put it back in. And I'm really pleased with that, because you can see it is - the fuzzy edge of the borage flower is this kind of pale, misty colour - And I'm so hopeful that I can avoid the mistakes I've made before when doing blue flowers against a green background, and that just being a bit careful about contrast is hopefully helping me to avoid this mistake. So we've got 1280. And what was the other one? I said FC24, which is this lovely sort of milky, soft, milky green... Taste and priorities are an important part of putting a palette together. My priorities are going to be different than yours. And if your absolute main thing with your inspiration source is that you want to get this this rich grassy green that's here FC11, you can just see it's right there. It's a beautiful colour. You know, that might be your number one priority is to get that in there. But I prioritised the bluey purpley colours, and that means that I then have to be very mindful about which greens I pair with it. I think that, that very bright green might be too much in the middle, like it might be too similar in terms of how dark and light it is to these colours, because I can see it doesn't look close. But then when you squint and you imagine those colours muddling up together and becoming knitting, I don't know how well they'll stand out from each other. We might get away with it. And that's what the next part the - you know, later on in the course when we start watching, these are all the questions that we can answer for ourselves. But for now, we're just trying to put together a palette so that we've got that very soft green, that very, very pale, slightly greenish colour. And we've got a question mark now. I've said it now. I've put it out there. It's such a good, it's such a good match, that green... That's too dark, we might add FC11, that very grassy green. And we'll just have to leave it to the swatching stage to, to start understanding whether or not it's too similar in value to these other shades. It's just so there, isn't it? I mean, when you look at these things together, that, that's what we can see is that green decided FC11's going in here as well. One, two, three, four, five, six. OK, so we've got two little spots to fill. And this is where really we need to think about how much contrast we've got in this palette. I'm just going on and on about this contrast, because if you haven't got contrast, it's so annoying because all your colours match and it's so beautiful. But then you try and knit and it just turns to mud. And this is what I want to spare you this pain of this happening so much, rather than seeing it against the wood of the table, I'm just going to get a plain piece of paper. I'm a bit worried that we're going to end up with a sludge, and I think we need something that's very dark and something that's very light. So if you have a smartphone, you can take a photo and then usually there is some way to edit it, some sort of filter that will let you then see it in black and white. You can see exactly what I was talking about, that that green, the darker green is quite similar to the darker colours up here. And what we're really missing from this palette is some very, very light colours and a very, very dark colour. When we're thinking about what is going to bring light to this palette and what's also going to speak to the inspiration source, I wonder about this little our very sweet little bloom of Meadowsweet here. And that's obviously going to be one of the whites. It's, it's quite a subtle difference, but I think that 1 - a very bleached white, I think that's that might be a bit harsh - but 1A is definitely going to give us the warm, slightly off white for the little Meadowsweet. We'll put that in as our, like, our very light colour. And then in terms of something very dark, we've got some different options. We could go navy - that would kind of speak to the purpley colours that we've got and give us one more... It's not purple, but it's in that, it's in that family of bluey purple colours. Or we could go one more green and I can't see which of those is actually the darker colour. So let's take a picture of those two colours. We're going to turn it to greyscale and there's not really very much in it. They're very close. But I think maybe the navy has the edge in terms of darkness. I suppose when we look at the darkest point of the little Borage flower, that's almost a perfect match for the navy. And then if we look at our greens, I think this green will end up being on its own... We won't be able to use this with any of the other greens. So I think we might take 36 as our, as our last colour. So there we have it, our lovely little palette based on these little flowers from the garden, and you can just see that there. And then let's just take one picture, just to double check that we have got enough contrast. There's our little photo turning it to greyscale so you can see there we've got plenty of contrast. We've got our lovely blues and purples to speak to these little flowers. We've got greens that are hopefully pale enough that these will show up. And then we've got a very dark colour that's going to help us describe some of these shapes and then this lovely little white colour that's just going to describe the Meadowsweet blossoms. So that's my final example of putting together a yarn palette based on an everyday inspiration source. And I hope that seeing me put these different palettes together has helped you a little bit with thinking about the first step of how you're going to edit your inspiration source into something that's knittable and it's complicated, as you've seen, because the world around us has millions of colours in it. It is a high resolution, extremely complicated, extremely detailed world. And then we're moving that into a very limited medium where we're only going to be using two colours per, per round at a time; where we have a very low resolution of about seven stitches per inch; and where we're limited by the yarns that are available for us to buy and by our budgets and what we want to spend on that yarn. So each step in The KNITSONIK System is another layer of editing and this is the first edit. So you start with your inspiration source and you edit it down into a palette which reflects that inspiration source. And I hope that you've got all the tools you need for that from this video. Once you've got your palette, you're going to be ready to start knitting; to start thinking about patterns; and to start the next stage of the process. But the first thing you need to do, obviously, is get your yarn together. So enjoy putting your palette together. And I hope that that process of sitting with your inspiration source and matching it to yarns or shade cards or photos of a shade card will help deepen your appreciation for your inspiration source and what it means to you in your life. See you in the next task.