more on color and creativity

I always need inspiration. When faced with a blank canvas my creative juices freeze right up. too many colors. too many possibilities. where to begin? At the "paint your own pottery" parlor i always spend at least the first hour browsing through the idea books until i find a jumping off point. My finished piece never looks anything like the one in the book, and i never intended it to. Same for scrapbooking, beading, and dyeing fiber. I'm in awe of knitting friends who think up a sweater and design it from the ground up. I need books, pictures, ideas to get the gears working.
I used to get very sheepish when friends would say "you are so creative!" No, i didn't think of that idea on my own... i started from an idea in a book and worked from there. "real" creative people come up with lovely things all on their own, right? i'm finally starting to change my mind.

A really awesome beading book got me thinking about this. I bought it at the Lush Beads 1st anniversary sale. Yes, i'm obsessed with color theory right now, and I don't need any more books on the subject. This one really caught my eye, though. Its called A The Beader's Guide to Color, by Margie Deeb. Even thought its specifically about beaded jewelry, there are gorgeous inspiration pictures and each page has multiple color scheme ideas based off of each major color. Last time i was doing some dyeing, i brought this book to the lab and flipped through it for inspiration. Without idea books i keep making variations on the same color combinations over and over again.

One of the ones i liked in the book was a yellow/lavender/purple grouping. I used that as my guide and painted two skeins of worsted wool in that color scheme. I think the skeins came out great. When i was looking for plane knitting last week, these two jumped into my luggage.

At the moment its sort of ugly and i'm not terribly in love with it (the bad picture helps none). I have faith that it will be more appealing once its blocked and behaving better though. I started with the "Cozy" pattern; and once i got the hang of the pattern repeat i realized that its actually a classic lace pattern that i've used for scarves before. It won't be huge (i did less pattern repeats than the knitty pattern), but i think that with both skeins i should be able to squeeze out a nice small stole / shoulder warmer / capelet-thingy. cross your fingers!


MA Sheep & Wool role call:
I was planning on going sunday, but now weather may dictate a saturday visit. If you'll be there on saturday let me know and we can try to make a meeting point/time.