02.1_Palettes_03.mp4

For my second inspiration source, I want to introduce you to this amazing book that was part of my childhood. And I remember when I was nearly the same size as this book: The Great World Atlas. It's now completely out of date, and there's country's in here that don't exist anymore because this was published in the 1980s. But I just love this book because it has these amazing big maps and gives you this beautiful sense of place. So I thought this might be a fun inspiration source. Going to actually use - as my inspiration source - because I'm filming this course and launching it to coincide with what would have been Shetland Wool Week 2020 - I'm going to use this little map of Shetland and I'm going to put together a palette that's based on this map of Shetland. Because the book is so big, it's really difficult to get it somewhere on the table... Now... So, I'm going to have to have it sideways, which you can still see it's Shetland there. And I will show you a photo of it the right way up. But for the purposes of picking colours, it's okay for it to be there. So what I'm going to do this time is, I've print it out from the J&S Shetland Woolbrokers website... They have a PDF of all of their yarn shades, which you can download for free and print out yourself. And it creates this lovely possibility to put your palette together like this. So, if you don't have a massive yarn stash, this is another way that you can pick a palette for your project. And it doesn't matter... I'm using this map, but you could be using a photo; you could be using a print; you could be using another tin... You could be using some printed fabric... Anything: you can use absolutely anything as an inspiration source; but I'm just using this because I thought it would be fun. Apart from anything else, one of the reasons that working from an inspiration source is so helpful when we're putting a palette together, is that if you can see that you love how all the colours look, together, in the inspiration source, it gives you so much confidence that they will also work in your knitting. And I love the way that all of these colours go together in the map. And that gives me great confidence that I would be able to do some knitting that's going to be beautiful to look at. So, yeah, any inspiration source that gives you that kind of confidence can be your starting point for putting together your palette. And what's great about printing these out is that you can then cut out the colours and, and you can kind of start playing with them. And, in fact, I think I'm going to just do that right away. We're going to have to speed this up, otherwise it's going to be very tedious, but I'm going to do for this actually, like let's... Let's go card by card. We can just see, is that yellow there? Is that yellow there? Is this... Yes, I had this down as 66 and 93 definitely being in this palette, or - sorry, it's 66 and 96 because 93 is really bright red colour. 53 is a bit peachy and it's a bit of a maybe; 23... Nope, 28... I mean, not really. 121... Not really. Not feeling that for this. 91? No. That's way too bright for this lovely map palette that we're going for. 90 is a sort of lovely, soft, warm peach colour. I love 90, but it's not here in this inspiration source. Onto reds: there's only one red here and it's just this little fine line. So again, with the matching of the colours...125 again, is that like orange tomato-ey soup type of shade of red; that's quite a good shout. So I'm going to put that on the maybe pile. FC7, it's a more of like a coral-y colour. And it's a bit heathery, whereas the print - the printed ink on this map is like a solid colour. So I'm going to give FC7 a miss for now. 1284 is very pink... I'm not seeing this pinky colour anywhere. 1281: not a bad shout, actually. FC45. That's a kind of caramel-y colour, but when I look at the map, it's more leaning towards olive-y, olive-y and green colours and remember, I'm working within a limitation, so I don't have to match every single colour. So I think we'll put... We'll say no for now to this. 32: it's like a lovely warm cinnamon nutmeg-y brown. I think I'm not seeing that anywhere in this inspiration source. And I'm aware in my budget of yarn that the blues and those lovely bluey greens are going to be important. So I don't want to blow my whole budget for this palette just on the creamy brownie red-y colours. No, no, no, no. These are all a bit of a no here. FC44: no, that's way too brown. FC43 is going on my maybe pile because that's a lovely - you can see, it's like a lovely, pale heathery beige. And it is quite like those paler bits there. And 1281 is also on my maybe pile. I might be confusing myself about where my mabye pile is, now. Blues... [Felix hums a small tune: do do do] ...blues and pinks. I don't think really we're going anywhere with these pinks. If we hold that up against the... In fact I'm going to cut into that so that we can actually see the colours next to the inspiration source. When we hold this up against the map, I'm just not seeing anything there: like, nothing is matching. So I think we can just give that, that part of the printed PDF shade card can completely go on the, on the "no" pile. The Greens is looking a lot more promising. There's a lot more of what's here, in here. And I'm just wondering is there another blues card here, because... you can see - even before you cut anything out - that it's all there, isn't it, in these blues and greens? OK. So. I feel like 71, this very turquoise-y, lovely green... It's like, it's, it's green but it's blue. I think that's right there. That's going on my definite pile. 75. Wondering about FC24 as well. 75 is this - might be a little bit too blue and not green enough - let's see. Looking at things, I think that that is too much of a bluey colour, and all of these, again, they're just a bit too warm and then running through here. This is quite good. FC39 speaking to those darker blues. See, I like those three together all, but they're all quite similar. Again, contrast: we need to be thinking about how am I going to... Those are still in my maybe pile. In the Greens, I'm just looking at those, those kind of hot greeny areas, I think FC24, if you look at that FC24, 66 and 96 all in a row together, that looks like the greens and the yellows and that... The high bits of the mountains. We've definitely got some nice greens and yellows going on, but then it's just about sorting out what are we going to use to speak to these, these darker colours. Now I'm seeing there's like a line that goes all the way around the edge of Shetland that's really quite dark. Is it 82 dark or is it 34 dark? I think it might be 34. It's like a nice green... In fact both of those work really well together. They're both sort of bluey greens. So, how many have we got there? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That's eight colours already. And these two questions, I think we can just put those away because it's kind of coming down to being about these. And we also... We need a red; arguably we need some sort of very dark colour, like a black, probably, again, to speak to those little inky... Inky words. What we need to understand is have we got enough contrast across this palette? You can see we've got a range of blues. I think this one's unnecessary, coming back to 75 now, wondering if we haven't got... No because we've got our lights here in these yellows; got a good range of middle colours there; we've got a couple of darker colours there. And then I wonder... The other red that I wonder about instead of using 125 is 93 which is like a really striking bright orange and red. The thing, the thing that makes me wonder about shade 93, is that the way that these red lines are popping out on the map, I think that 93 might do a better job of getting us there than 125, which is a slightly cooler red. And when you compare them side by side in your little cut out - like little paint chips that you've made - You can see... I think 93 stands out a bit more, so I'm going to, I'm going to keep that one. So now we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That's our, that's our palette that I've made in a really DIY way from just downloading these the PDF shade card of the J&S website. Now, you can see that you could add a lot more colours in if you wanted to. You could add in like a some creamy white colours right at the top to speak to these really pale bits, although 96 will do a good job of that because it's such a very pale yellow and you could see that, you could add in a few more greens and a few more blues and you could add in a black as well. I feel like I've sort of run out of... Well, I kind of run out of colours with my budget of eight, so I'm just going to leave it at this. But when you're putting your palette together, you could you could add in a few extra ones if you wanted. If I was adding in more, I would put in... Because this is looking like really...it's looking super colourful, because I've gone for all the main kind of colours. But I think I would definitely add in... Now it's not super easy - and this is one of the limitations of doing things like this - 5 looks like a deep brown, but the nuance of that is a little bit lost in this printout. 80, I think, is also a deep brown. The other colours on here... I'm getting a fairly good, good likeness. So if I was adding in more, I'd put in 202, which is this kind of creamy off-white dirty colour, which... You can see it clearer there, that it's like the page white. I'd also put in 1A, which is like a little bit lighter off-white for those really pale bits in the water... I'd put in 77, so that I had a nice hard black in the palette... And maybe 81. Now I feel like I've got a very strong range of darks - a few more than we had before - and I would also bring back FC34. Yes, that's a bit more of a comprehensive palette. And we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. And you probably don't need 202 and 96. So, like, if we went with a twelve shade palette, I think that would, that would give a lot of possibilities for playing with this idea of this map. And yeah, you can see I've just done that by printing out the shade cards from J&S and cutting them up and using them like little paint chips against my inspiration source. So that is a way - if you don't have a shade card and if you haven't got any balls of yarn - that is a way that you can begin creating the yarn palette for your project. So - and then I think I'll just take it back to - if we just had the eight colours that I had suggested before... And we can take a black and white photo and see that there is quite good contrast across that palette. So you would have enough stuff to play with.