Colour theory and excuses

Last week I did a little bit of moaning about the fact I can't share what I'm crocheting at the moment.
I have 3 secret projects on the go at the moment.

The first and biggest project is my book, I have finally started writing patterns and realised I have a mountain of work to do.
Luckily the blankets are under control, I've finished 7 blankets and am well over half way through number 8, numbers 9 and 10 are in the design stage.
Number 9 is going to be relatively simple, but I'm planning a mega complex explosion of colour for number 10 :-)
The second project is the Zodiac which is really 2 in 1 as I'm having to sew in Phil's ends and construct the knitted blanket as well as the crochet one.
I think we are up to September, I'd like to get it finished ASAP, but I need to be realistic and do all the other things I need to do too.
And the last project is something I am working on for Love Crochet, hopefully all will be revealed in the very near future.

All these projects mean that I don't really have much to say or share with you, I've been very quiet on Instagram and my other social networking sites.
Yesterday I decided I needed to do something positive about it rather than moaning that I was too busy.

So here is yesterday's work.
It is the beginnings of a colour wheel/rainbow tutorial.
I made my own life incredibly difficult when I closed NDS, all my designs are made out of NDS yarns and so I need to recommend replacements to you so you can make my designs.
I didn't realise how difficult finding yarns to recommend would be, firstly I need to find natural yarns that I enjoy using and then I need to choose the yarns that have the biggest colour ranges in them..sigh..
DK isn't too difficult as there are lots of DK yarns I like, but 4 ply is proving a bit of a nightmare.

So to make it as easy as possible for you I decided I needed to do some swatches to explain what I'm trying to say.

 

I started off with 2 big piles of yarn, because stupidly I thought I could do all the colour wheel swatches for both in a day!

The 2 yarns are my NDS colours, which are my default colours and the other yarn is Drops Alpaca

        

After I had crocheted a couple of base circles I realised I didn't have time to do both yarns, so the Drops Alpaca got put back in the basket for another day.

My plan was to do 3 wheels for each yarn, one for the primary colours, one for the secondary colours and one whole wheel.

I started with the whole wheel (primary, secondary and tertiary colours)  as it was easier to work backwards.

The base colour is silver, as I don't really like white, its far too easy to get dirty.

I try not to wear white as it seems to instantly attract food, whether I've eaten or not.

Anyway this is the whole NDS colour wheel, these are most of the colours I use for all my designs.

There are a few other colours, but if you collect these you should be able to make most of my blankets easily.

 I photographed the wheel on a white background as in theory this would give the truest colours, however I also photographed it on the natural wooden background of my coffee table because I like the way the colours look against the wood.

Neither of the above photo's look completely right, so I will need to take lots more photo's before I am happy with them.

The same goes for the photo's below, which are the secondary colours in the colour wheel.

Then I ran out of time and so the primary colour wheel is missing.

Once I've finished the 3 NDS wheels I will re-photograph them and write an explanation that hopefully will make a lot more sense than the waffle I have written in the blog post :-)