Color Theory

I have been very inspired by the various color going-ons around blogland lately.

• Project Spectrum, of course.
  
• The Ripple-along and Granny-along have inspired me to look into color combos I normally wouldn't consider.
• Speaking of blankets,Mitered Blankets are always an inspiration, but Cara's has me panting!
• Which led me to Ruth's great tutorial on making a color pallette from a picture (and check out the Patterns in Nature!).

And that very neatly brings me to a project I've had rolling around for quite a while. As you might have noticed from my daily photos, I've gotten kind of obsessed with branches and the patterns they make against the sky. At the same, I've been swatching some unusual yarn. This started me mulling over the ways to recreate the branch-on-sky affect in knitting. There is, of course, lace. But I wanted something more...literal, I guess and hemp yarn fits the bill. I want to recreate some of my favorite photographs and display the photo and the fiber art side by side.
At first I imagined knitting the shape of trees and branches out of the hemp and imposing it on a painted canvas, but that seems too flat and frankly, I'm not that comfortable with paint. I've also considered handmade paper collages and/or dyeing fabric for the background. It wasn't until last night, while flipping through my mom's Freeform Knitting and Crochet that the most obvious answer appeared: I could knit the background! And not in St st, but in the bumpy, nubbly texture of freeform: combining knitting and crochet and a variety of yarns to get the softly shifting colors of the sky.
This is where the photo-editing software really comes in handy.
I took the above photo and applied a mosaic filter in Photoshop and ended up with this:


A pretty good guideline for the knitting.
And then I used the tutorial to pull out the colors for the palette:Which I arranged vertically the way the photo is. In other words, the colors in the bottom third of the photo are in the bottom third of the palette, etc.
Now (I think) I'm going to find, dye or spin yarns to match my palette and get started on the background.