I mentioned Design-seeds.com in my last post as a good color resource, but there are SO MANY others!  Today I’m going to tell you about just one, and I hope you’ll check it out and enjoy it.  Others to come in the future!

—Today’s Feature: Palette Builder—

Here’s a palette from a picture I took

It’s free!  It’s easy to use!  Anne Sullivan and friends have a fun app accessible from their blog at Play-Crafts.com.  Just go to the blog, choose PaletteBuilder from the menu along the top, and you’re IN.  You can upload a picture of your choice and the app gives you a palette that looks a lot like the ones on Design Seeds with two fun differences:  PaletteBuilder uses YOUR photo, and it gives you colors in Kona Cotton that closely match your palette!

Palette made from my quilt

But let’s say you love the palette in my “Study for New Mexico” quilt and want to use it for a quilt of your own.  Just find the quilt on my blog, load the picture into PaletteBuilder, and there you go.  The Kona cottons are chosen for you!

PaletteBuilder may “see” individual colors better than your mind does

This program may be especially helpful with a picture like the one above.  First, I wouldn’t have thought to put those shades of lavender in there, but I’m pretty sure they would show up well as shadows if I were converting this picture to a landscape quilt. Second, if you’re working on a desktop computer instead of an iPad you can move some of those little circles to sample parts of the picture that might have been left out (like the purple crocus in the top picture.)

So if you have a photo with lovely colors that you would like to see in a quilt, you can start here for your palette.  Now, go have some fun!

Here are the previous posts in this series (click on the title to go to the post):

Quilt Design 4: Choosing Your Color Scheme

Your Inner Designer 3: New Blocks From Old

Your Inner Designer 2: Many Block Arrangements

Find Your Inner Designer, Part 1