Cataloguing Colours

I'm feeling particularly achey this week (it would be nice if my immune system could work out that it doesn't still need to fight Covid) and it's been hard to do things. At times like this, it's easy to just concentrate on the 'must dos' like cooking and eating - not much fun when you're exhausted and you can't taste the food anyway. It helps to just try to think "what do I feel like doing?" and then go with that, even if it means starting yet another new project.

So, yesterday I catalogued 58 knitted squares. This is what happens when you're the mother of an archivist, you start listing your world. Actually, this was something I've been wanting to do for months. It all started with this ...

This is a Scheepjes Colour Pack of all 36 shades of their Stone Washed yarn and the 22 River Washed shades. Each little ball weighs 10g and is enough to knit or crochet a square. The yarn is a mixture of cotton and acrylic and is lovely to work with.

My plan was to knit a square in each colour, leaving just enough yarn to wind a colour peg for future reference. I used my favourite stitch pattern from my Frankie's Blankie, Quilted Lattice and just added a small garter stitch border as I went.

The two yarns in the pack are a bit different. The yellow is Stone Washed and is smooth and, although different shades are blended in each colour, this blending is very subtle. The orange River Washed square is fluffier and the blend of colours is much more noticeable. 

I blocked my squares as I went along and ended up with a big pile of them; they're about 13 cm or 5" square.

Mostly there was enough yarn left to wind a full colour peg but there are a few scantily clad ones too. I used up every bit of yarn.

My big idea for these squares was to use them to make a digital shade card, one that I could use for planning colour schemes for future blankets. This is where the cataloguing comes in. First, I separated them into the two types and then matched each square with its colour peg. I started with the 36 Stone Washed colours.

The next thing to do was to photograph each square separately and to name the images with the shade number and the name of the colour (I'd written this on the pegs). This took a while but was nicely mindless. I copied each finished image and then cropped those copies so that the square filled the image. These are the pictures I plan to use for designing.

So ... I use the free photo editing software Photoscape and one of the features they offer is 'page' where you can combine individual images to make one finished picture. There are lots of options for arranging your photos, including one with 25 even sized square tiles. Blanket planning, here we go! For numbers of squares below 25 I just crop the unused ones out at the editing stage; for bigger numbers I'd put more than one image together on a normal document. 

To test it out I made blocks of all 36 Stone Washed colours in order, twelve at a time.

Shades 801 - 812

Shades 813 - 824

Shades 825 - 836

Then I put together some simple diagonal stripes ...

You can also add borders to the individual squares to get an idea of what it would look like if edgings were added to the squares - perhaps in a crochet blanket.

Lots of fun to be had here. When I catalogued the River Washed squares, I noticed how much more intense the colours were than the Stone Washed, something I hadn't realised while knitting them. 

Stone Washed

River Washed

Interestingly, neither range has much in the way of true blues but there are quite a few turquoises and blue-greens. Not much yellow either but a fair bit of orange. Put together, I think they make a very useful colour palette. I'm tempted to try a crochet blanket first but, in the meantime, I've got to decide what to do with my 58 squares - not the easiest number to turn into a blanket.