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color inspiration in a book

Palette Perfect by Lauren Wager is a book all about color. It’s really more of a lookbook. I think it took me less than 30 minutes to read, but I have spent a long time studying the palettes that Lauren has put together.

The book concentrates on the moods of your life. Colors that represent those emotions and moods. She then makes palettes of 3-5 colors that represent the mood.

She presents 15 different emotions such as tranquility, curiosity and trendy. Within each chapter she gives images such as paintings, photographs and textiles. Each of these has a “color wheel” of colors shown in that image. The size of the pieces of the wheel represent the amount of color in that image. And then for each color she gives the CMYK percentages and the RBG percentages.

CMYK is used for printed materials. Dyeing can use the CMYK numbers too. But the numbers aren’t a direct % of each color, as the numbers add up to more than 100. But lets say that if the number is 14/0/35/80 You would have a color that is mostly black with about half as much yellow, no magenta and a small amount of cyan. So the color is a deep green color. If you aren’t a math nerd, that’s OK.

I love this book for it’s pure inspiration. Looking through it you can find some combinations that you may not have thought about before. Get yourself a copy here on Amazon. This is just a link, I haven’t received a fee for reviewing or promoting this book. It is merely a good book for those who want to hone their color sense and widen their creative use of color.

If you’ve always wanted to learn to dye, I’m working on a dyeing ecourse that is almost ready to be released in the world. You can find out more here .

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book review Faerie Knits

My absolute favorite author is Alice Hoffman. I love all of her books and all of her short stories. There is always an element of the paranormal whether that be a witch or a heron husband. She writes stories of family and love and apple orchards and death beetles. Perhaps her most well known book is Practical Magic which was made into a wonderful movie.

Blue Heron Shawl is on the cover

So when I saw that she co-wrote a knitting book with her cousin, well, I just had to have it. I was fortunate to get a signed copy, but not so lucky to actually meet Ms. Hoffman. I did however have a really nice conversation with Lisa her cousin.

This book includes 14 fairy tales which were originally published in Faerie Magazine. Each story features a heroine who knits and a knitted object. I think that my favorite of all the stories is the one featuring the Blue Heron. This heron story has made appearances in Hoffman’s books, most recently in “The World That We Knew”.

I also love that each well written pattern includes Knitting Wisdom to explain some technique or to help with making color decisions.

The mix of patterns is very diverse. There are items you could make in an hour or two and there are larger more intricate patterns. I think the mix also is good for beginners, intermediates and maybe even some advanced knitters. I highly recommend this book for it is a good read and inspires great knitting.