I won’t be at the meeting tomorrow — I’m out of town, on vacation — so Carol asked me to post about how I chose my colors for Sudoku.

When I choose colors for a design, I frequently start with some color inspiration along with the actual materials list for the piece which I think of as a model, leaving out the colors but taking note of the values (dark vs. light). I  also noticed that Marilyn Owen’s colors were complementary, or opposite each other on the color wheel — pink and green. After some thought I discarded that as a plan, though, and decided to stick with my own color inspiration.

For Sudoku my  inspiration came from some Persian relief sculptures I saw many years ago at an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The colors have always stuck with me, and in fact I have to resist the urge to do EVERYTHING in these colors! Here are a couple of images I found on the Internet — not the same pieces I saw at the Met, but similar. The colors are somewhat darker than what I have in my mind’s eye, but you get the idea.

With my inspiration images in mind, I studies the materials list in Needle Pointers: two shades each of two colors, one shade of a third color that might be a neutral, a metallic, and a variegated thread. The samples shown in the article don’t stick to this precisely, though. It obviously makes it harder if you don’t have a specific model to follow (too many choices!), so I decided to try and follow the materials list model. But if the threads I found led me in a different direction, that would probably be OK as well.

In the end I managed to stick to the materials list model — two shades of turquoise Impressions, two shades of green Impressions, cream Impressions, and Watercolors “South Pacific.” I chose a gold metallic braid to go with it — I toyed with silver, which frequently looks good paired with turquoise, but decided that the gold gave it all a richer look.

(For some reason the greens look right in this photo but the turquoises do not — they are too blue and not greeny enough.)

Even though I won’t be at the meeting, I’ll be stitching along with you tomorrow night, and will post a photo of my progress. You can never be entirely certain that your color choices are going to be successful — or look like what you expect — until you see them stitched.