Sunday, 4 May 2014

Knit and Crochet Flower Garden

When I started with the knitted roses, I had in mind some sort of flower garden scarf.  Since then, I've done 14 crochet flowers and counting, but I still haven't quite decided quite what it's going to be.  Something wearable, perhaps it will be a scarf, perhaps not.

Once I started the crochet flowers, I decided that I should put together a colour palette for my flowers and their eventual leaves.  I found Design Seeds some time ago, and loved the way that five or six (sometimes more) colours in toning and contrasting shades were picked out of interesting photos to create colour palettes. (The pic on the left is an edited screenshot of the Google search results for Design Seeds and orange.)







A friend and I went shopping over the Easter break and remarked on the peach/coral/salmon shades in evidence at the moment.  I don't wear girly pinks if I can help it, but I like these orangey-pink shades and found myself seeing them everywhere. My friend even bought me a bunch of salmon pink spray carnations!
(I've worked out how to do a photo montage, too.)




Inspired by this, I put together a basket of orange-peach-pink-yellow and greens which I thought went well, and these are the colours I shall use for the knit and crochet flowers and leaves, a sub-project of my Flower a Day project.

It's been a bit grey and murky recently, so I had to sit the basket on the back doorstep in order to take a photo.  The colours are fairly accurate.  Unfortunately the orange for the marigolds and flower centres is a rather bright and luminous, like the peach. Hopefully the cool bluey-greens will tone them down a bit.

2 comments:

knittingdragonflies said...

Nice combo of colors, I always struggle to get colors together that look right. I'll have to remember this and look at what mother nature is doing!
Take care
Vicki

Dancing Moth said...

Yes, I've always lacked confidence with colour combinations, having been told 'one leader, two followers' and to avoid colours which clashed. It's probably still good advice for clothing when you're trying to look smart, but the worm turned after I turned 50, realised that when it comes to flowers, nothing seems to clash, and re-read Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies*. I find the Design seeds palettes useful, and putting the colours together (like the yarn basket, or pieces of fabric on a table) as it allows you to stand back and see whether the colours and their values (light/dark, saturated/muted) work together. *"The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery
is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower
Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken
into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo¹, my
son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And
the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.

¹ Cool, but not necessarily up to date."

Terry Pratchett, 'Lords and Ladies', 1992