Tool Reviews

As a crafter, inspiration rarely strikes when you are sitting perfectly still in your studio staring at a color wheel. Inspiration usually strikes randomly: during a walk through a damp forest, while looking at a rusty peeling door in an alleyway, or while watching a spectacular summer sunset.

Nature and architecture provide the most complex, beautiful, and perfectly balanced color palettes on earth. The challenge is translating the chaotic beauty of a real-world scene into five useable colors of yarn, paint, or paper.

Fortunately, pulling a color palette directly from a photograph is easier than ever. Whether you want to use digital software or train your own eyes, here is the complete guide to extracting perfect color schemes from the world around you.

Understanding the theory behind the color wheel is incredibly important for any artist or crafter. Knowing why complementary colors work, or how to mix the perfect shade of brown, is the foundation of good design.

However, sometimes you just do not have the time or the mental energy to sit down and mathematically calculate a split-complementary color scheme. Sometimes, you just want a computer to hand you five beautiful, perfectly balanced hex codes so you can start painting.

We live in the golden age of digital design assistance. There are dozens of incredibly powerful, mostly free websites designed to do the heavy lifting of color curation for you. Whether you are building a website, painting a mural, or planning a quilt, here are the top 5 digital tools you need to bookmark immediately.

Every crafter knows the danger of Pinterest. You log on to find a simple pattern for a scarf, and three hours later, you have pinned 400 wildly different images ranging from gothic architecture to pastel cupcake recipes.

Pinterest is an incredible, bottomless well of inspiration, but if you do not use it strategically, it will completely paralyze your creative process. When starting a new project (like designing a quilt, planning a wedding, or renovating a craft room), you must transition from "mindless pinning" to "curating a mood board."

A mood board is a highly focused collection of images that establishes the exact aesthetic, texture, and—most importantly—the color palette of your project. Here is the exact, step-by-step process for using Pinterest as a professional design tool.