Choosing Colors For Crochet Motifs

Through working on the Weaving Stories project, I faced many interesting challenges along the way in dealing with the contributing artists.

I am used to doing all of the design work myself for projects, so guiding the artists by phone and email, seemed like working with my hands tied behind my back!

I had a particularly enlightening experience with one of the artists who was a crocheter, Ghadah Al Moosa, of the Crochet Cafe. She submitted a design that was inspired by the Islamic theme. She designed a crochet motif that was inspired by a traditional islamic design. I gave the artists color palettes for each theme so they could choose their materials accordingly. Since I was going to be putting so many different panels from different people using different techniques, the color scheme was key in making the installation cohesive!

I thought that it would be straight forward for this panel. It turns out, that the type of yarn and order of the colors made a huge difference in the look of the panel. I had Ghadah try a few color combinations based on what I thought would look good, but somehow they just weren't right. I felt so bad asking her to do so many samples, and I felt even worse rejecting them all! I decided that the best way, would be to try drawing and coloring in samples to get an idea of what would look best. My freehand drawings weren't effective enough, so I went in search of a program to trace the photo, so I could print and color it. I was thrilled to find this free online, easy to use stencil making program! In a nutshell, you can take a photo of your motif, then upload it to the website and choose from three different types of tracing options, depending on what gives you the best result. From there I edited the traced photo in a photo editing program to make it even sharper. 

I printed out a page of the traced motifs and set to work with some colored pencils, trying all of the combinations I could think of. I narrowed it down to my two favorites, and Ghadah graciously agreed to crochet a few more versions. She sent me photos of each, and I cut and pasted multiples of each version side by side, to represent how they would look as a panel in the wall. From there it was easy to determine which would look the best. 

Some of the color options I experimented with.

The actual panel on the blocking board (photo by Ghadah Al Moosa)

I think we really succeeded with this version, as the Islamic section of the wall was one of the most photographed by the media!

The Islamic themed section of the Weaving Stories Wall (photo by Tammy Asad)

Weaving Stories article in the Kuwait Times newspaper.

To sum things up, the stencil making photo tracing program opens up a new world of opportunities to help with making color choices for your designs!