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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Quilty Pleasures Wednesday-Quilt Colors in Nature

It wasn't until recently that I was able to choose colors for my quilt projects. Forced to harmonize fabric that went with a particular print, I was usually paralyzed and relied on my color savvy friends to help, or I bought everything in a particular fabric line to ensure that it all went together.

I'm not so much into matching anymore, but I do want my colors to harmonize and look like I made at least a few thoughtful choices. After a "Doh!" moment, I realized selvages help a lot, but I will save that for another post.

A couple years ago I bought the book Portraits from Nature by Jean Wells which showed how Jean uses photos of natural places to choose colors for her projects. This is good, but I took her idea a little further, exploring color generating websites to see what colors they could pull out from my photos.

If you read yesterday's blog post, you saw this photo below of the area behind our house in all its fall glory.



I found Color Palette Generator at the DeGraeve website. What you do is stick a photo's URL address into the box and in a minute or so it pulls out the major colors from the pic.

To the right of the photo are many, but not all, of the photo's colors. I was disappointed not to see the yellow-orange leaf colors, but heck, even this member of Densa International could figure that out.


Here's a shot of the Growing Dome from last spring, one of my favorites because of that beautiful blue sky. I tried Big Huge Labs website to see if there would be a difference in how many colors it could pull from the pic.


And yep, there was a big difference! This site picked out five more colors than the first one did. Some are close to alike, but still, I thought it was pretty neat-o.

Now if you were to have an ipad or other tablet computer, you could take a screenshot of the webpage and tote it to your LQS as a reference when choosing colors for a quilt. Or, if you have a color printer, you could print out the page and leave the hardware at home.

3 comments:

  1. this is soo cool! what a great idea! but it's not quilty wednesday..is it? now i'm confused...theer

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  2. Yep, you are correct, Theer! I got ahead of myself.....or is this the start of senile me?

    ReplyDelete
  3. that's o.k. we'll take it anyway we can get it. it was a great post. thanks ;) theer

    ReplyDelete

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