Our Year of Color Studies

For the past few years, Reno Fiber Guild has been choosing a theme to carry them through their programs and activities in the guild year.  This year our chosen theme is color.  Most all fiber artisans love color.  Some use it with ease, some use it without stretching its boundaries and some cling to a monochromatic scheme in fear of failure.

I'm told that color is like all other studies.  One becomes more adept at using it when you know more about how colors interact with one another. There is always the personal choice factor in choosing colors for a project and what attracts one person may be unattractive to another.  We aren't here to judge, just to give our members and readers choices and opportunities to think about color and to choose something that makes their heart sing.

Top of the list is Nadine Sanders self guided study on color.  You will find an array of exercises that may stimulate new thinking about color in your projects.  And, if you follow her advice to find color pictures that are pleasing to you, you might want to use this tool  from Tin Eye.  It extracts the colors in a photo so that you can find yarns to match.

The color calculator is one of those wonders of the internet.  Amazing to play with and you might actually come up with something that you can use. It takes a bit of time to fiddle with all of its features, so when you have nothing else on your plate, give it a try.

The Adobe online color wheel is another interesting tool which kind of makes my head spin sometimes with the choices it gives you.

Randall Darwall was a master of color in handwoven cloth.  Over the years, Randall taught a great many people his secrets.  Meg Nakagawa is a weaver who lives in Nelson, New Zealand.  She and her fellow weavers had a workshop with Randall and she chronicled her struggles and successes in his workshop in her blog, Unravelling.  Read through her posts to see if Randall can teach you something as well. 

After we think about color, we are often in search of a good striping pattern with our new color ideas.  This random stripe generator   My first attempts at using this were kind of blah, until I realized that you need to check several colors  and then in the box below, select several boxes that give you a variety of widths for your stripes.  Once you get the generator to give you a stripe combination, you can refresh your page several times to get more ideas.  There is also a weighted stripe generator so that if you have a few ounces of this, and that, it will give you a stripe pattern tailored to the amount of each color you have in your stash.

Once you have decided on your color scheme, Robyn Spady has a good color proportion  rule to share in this link.  Once you have gotten to Robyn's site, she will also have another list of links for you to try.  The possibilities seem endless, don't they.