When I saw her photo, I had already pulled together a few skeins of yarn, starting with one I created during Spinzilla. This skein was randomly spun from four ounces of different fibers that I had received from Spinning Box in September 2017. Unfortunately I did not keep track of which fiber came from which business, since I was concentrating on Spinzilla! Below on left, is the two miles of fiber I spun during Spinzilla. The yarn I had chosen as a core of the next project is the sixth from left on top row, with shades of green, yellow, blue, black and white. The second photo shows it as a closer view (on the right).
You can see from this photo that the yarns are of various weights, especially the copper-colored one. I decided to ply this very fine yarn, so wound off two balls and using my spinning wheel, made it into a 3-ply, which took a couple of hours. The original yarn was a Z-twist, so I plied in an S-direction. These letters refer to the direction of the twist, which you can see by examining the yarn closely, and the diagonal bar in the letter. By turning the spinning wheel in a clockwise direction, you achieve Z-twist, by turning it counter-clockwise, you achieve an S-twist. It is still quite a bit finer than the others, and is still in the lace-weight category, so I am considering winding off into a center-pull ball and plying it one more time with a Z-twist from both ends of the ball.
I complemented the yarn with others from my stash. One was a special skein from Grace Gerber, who was the creative genius behind Larkspur Funny Farm. It's shown in the upper left corner below. I've had them piled in a a basket in my dining room, walking past them for inspiration. I knew there was not enough for a complete sweater, but I was looking at the color harmonies. I decided to add a blue alpaca that has been lingering in my stash for 20 years or more. That is the cone at lower left.
Then I saw Leya's photo and was impressed by how many of the same colors were reflected in her photo!
I quickly added a few more stash yarns. I found an online utility, palettefx.com, that will pull the palette colors out of your photo, and using it and a few other graphics tools, I soon had a side-by-side comparison of the palette in her photo and my selected yarns.
Well, I realized that the background of my photo was grey, which accounts for the greys in the middle of the top palette. As you can see, many of the other colors are very similar! I just needed the ochre and browns from Leya's palette to act as a complementary! (According to the palettefx site, these colors are "Rusty Nail" and Millbrooke.) One neat feature of this site is that for many colors, there are suggested suppliers for the colors in the palette. Here is an example for Millbrooke.
Unfortunately, for that particular color the link does not work, maybe the yarn was discontinued? Clicking on the lavender bar at the left yielded this ad for JoAnn Fabric store with a specific suggested yarn. Kind of a nice feature, if it works.
I am not sure of what algorithm they might use to match the colors, since the lavender bar in the palette did not have a name, only a hex number, and to my eye, none of the featured yarn colors are a match for the lavender, although perhaps the pile of yarn at the left includes this shade.
Good thing I will not need to shop for any more yarn! At any rate, since a couple of the colors in Leya's photo were not included in my selected yarns, I found another couple of yarns in my existing stash that I hope are close to matching, or at least pleasing.
So, the final yarn selection for the project is shown below, with the large cones, I am sure I will not run out of yarn.
Next up: Pattern selection!
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