Color me fascinated!

My design wall looks about the same this week as last. I still have made no decisions about the piecing for the basket wall hanging and I am still appliqueing away on the border of the Moda quilt and the Tweets block. The good news is that I have nearly all the leaves pressed and starched for the next long border (there are 10 flowers per border, 4 leaves per flower and I make extra so I can be sure to have a good color selection), at this point I feel like they are chasing me around in my nightmares! The tweets block is also nearly complete.  To check out what other people have on their walls today check out Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times.

All this working on existing stuff doesn't mean I haven't been THINKING design... I have been doing a lot of doodling while listening in meetings (you know, stitching then would look rude, so I act like I'm taking notes!). I start out to practice free motion patterns, but I always end up with something else, like the flower. Not exactly a practical quilting pattern! I also got my camo scraps from Victoria over at Bumble Beans for Operation Uniform. I am dreaming of block designs for those, but no decisions yet. I also found a very cool tool the other night that really INSPIRED me and I will share with you...

The title of this post should really read "Kuler" me fascinated. I found an online color tool some time ago while looking for a good way to preview colors together for the purpose of choosing fabrics for the on-going Tweets applique project (and because I was hoping to find an online color wheel type thingy because I couldn't find mine!).

What I stumbled upon is Adobe Kuler. I didn't get too much of a chance to understand how it works at the time, but I did have a marvelous time playing with the palletes. How the colors are related to each other and why some of the colors will change by themselves when you manually change one is still a bit of a mystery. However, I discovered tonight that one can make a pallete (actually many palletes) based on an uploaded photo! My first photo was a shot of a freshly splintered piece of oak that fell in our woods due to a wind storm a few weeks ago. It is gorgeous range of light tans and reddish browns with lots of muted purple and some charcoal thrown in. I thought it would make a wonderful warm neutral pallete for a quilt. Kuler was able to pull out colors I hadn't even noticed like beautiful roses and subtle but rich greens that add a complimentary color.

I don't think I can actually post the pallets here because they are actually Adobe Flash entities (??) but I will give you the links to some that I came up with. I tried to come up with several different ones but I keep getting drawn back to the "fresh oak dark" pallet with the green in it. It must really be stuck in my mind's eye. Of course also lovely is the "fresh oak muted" and I am beginning to be very fond of the warm and inviting "fresh oak warm".  It might be fun to make a quilt with these colors... hmm, I have a Groupon for a LQS to use before December.  It might be enough to buy fabric for a lovely wall hanging, maybe a couch throw if I can use some of my stash. I will be exploring this website more and maybe planing a quilt... *sigh* all I need is to START something else new! I really need a few clones, or maybe a house elf or two. Which pallete do you like best?