Huesday Tuesday 7.30.13

A freshly finished project and new yarn

This project has been a bunch of blocks slowly accumulating in a bag for so long, I can hardly believe that it's finally finished. I am so excited!

I was first inspired to make this blanket when I saw this tutorial. It was free at the time, but now it's on her Etsy shop. I really liked the idea, but I wanted the bobbles to be further apart. I improvised my own motif for the blocks, and I'm really happy with how they turned out. I wish they were a little closer to the actual proportions of legos, but I still really like them.

Once I had 120 blocks (phew!), I joined them together with single crochet on the long sides into 10 rows of 12 blocks each. Then, I joined each row together with single crochet. Finally, I did a single crochet all around the blanket. The nice thing about joining this way is that I was able to crochet in all the yarn ends, so I only had one yarn end to weave in at the end. Nice!

My nephew is coming into town this weekend (which is who I made this for). I'm so excited to give it to him. I hope he likes it. His mom (my sister) thinks he will, so I'm hopeful.

I also got a shipment of yarn in the mail yesterday - some Drops Safran. I've used this yarn before, and I love it. It's 100% cotton that's so soft and shiny, and look at those colors together. Don't they look nice? I can't wait to get my hooks into those.

Welcome to our new blog feature: Huesday Tuesday

From now on, here on A Pinch of Katy, every Tuesday will be Huesday Tuesday. I will post a color palette from an inspiring picture. I'm very excited about this new feature. I hope you enjoy it.

Where to find color inspiration

I love to play with color when I'm making and designing, but I'll admit, when I'm in the store or on a website shopping for yarn, I get stuck. I'll grab a few colors I like and stare at them forever, trying to figure out if they will look good together in a final project. I'll grab random people as they go down the aisle and say, "Hey, do you think these go together?"

Honestly, there have been quite a few people who have said I have a good color sense when they see my designs, but I don't really feel that way. I had a lot of trouble matching colors when I was growing up. When I started dressing myself, it was quite common for me to go to school in clashing outfits. Even now, a good 25+ years from when I started dressing myself, I do not often take chances when picking clothes to wear. So, for both reasons above, I find it very helpful and inspiring to find color inspiration online, and I will share the best resources I've found below.

Sure, this one is obvious, but it's still worth mentioning. Tons of people post pictures for the purpose of color inspiration, and you can use your Pinterest boards to catalog all the inspiration you've found elsewhere. And, when you find good images on Pinterest, you can use . . .

. . . to create a palette from the image. You can also use Color Hunter to generate palettes from an image and see palettes that other people have created.

Another great compendium for inspiration is Colour Lovers. You can find pictures, palettes, patterns, individual colors, and more. There's so much, it's really kind of overwhelming.

If you're looking for ready-made palettes, these sites are great resources.

The Perfect Palette is branded towards weddings and parties, but there are still many great palettes to use for your designs.

Design Seeds is by far my favorite site for color palettes. Not only does she provide the photo and palette for inspiration, but she also posts the hexidecimal code for each color. So, you can copy and paste the codes for use in your website or paste them into Photoshop or your preferred photo editing software. The color scheme for this blog is based on one I saw on Design Seeds.

Creature Comforts also features regular color inspiration posts. You can also find DIY tutorials, free printables, and other inspiration on the site. It's really quite a nice blog, all in all.

For the Love of Color has some beautiful palettes as well. You can browse them by color in the right hand menu, or click archives to browse by categories such as food, interiors, or nature.

Color Collective has almost 1,000 bold and interesting palettes.

And, you know what? I love these things so much, that I think I might start posting some palettes myself.

Sneak Preview: Doily Necklaces

Take a look at some of the new items coming soon to the shop. I am very excited about this new line of jewelry. Here's just a smattering of what's to come. What's shown below is made of some vintage mercerized cotton thread, but I've also gotten my hands on some great organic cotton thread in some great colors that I am absolutely in love with.