Dead Simple Quilt - picking a palette

OK so it's time to pick palettes. After going round in circles with a number of Design Seeds palettes, I've settled on this one.

My next step was to dig out some Kona solids to match the six colours in the palette and I've chosen ash, snow, candy green, coal, cerise and sand. In real life the cerise is a good match but the photograph has made it look quite a lot redder.

If you do not already have one, a Kona colour card is a wonderful investment - a small square of each Kona solid is stuck onto the colour card so you can see the actual colours of the fabrics you are going to be using. It is also an enormous help when ordering fabrics online if the shop carries the Kona colour card to ask whether the fabric you are buying matches a certain Kona colour. You can buy one of these at the Fat Quarter Shop in the US and at Simply Solids in the UK.

Another way of achieving the same thing would be to invest in Kona's dark and light Bounty of Basics boxes which give you the opportunity to pull FQs of every Kona colour and see how the colours all play alongside each other. I am not suggesting you invest $350 just for this QAL but the Bounty of Basics boxes are a wonderful tool for the serious quilter. Perhaps put them on your Christmas list! Again, these are available from the Fat Quarter Shop. Here are mine with the six palette colours sitting on top.

Alternatives if you have no Kona colour card or Bounty of Basics boxes are to collect paint chips / cards from your local DIY store and use these for colour matching or to take a great big children's felt tip pen set and pull out the colours from these to make your palette. And of course if you haven't yet added the button to your blog, here it is again.

<div align="center"><a href="http://lilysquilts.blogspot.com/2011/08/interested-in-dead-simple-qal.html" title="Dead Simple Quiltalong"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ-jR6z5dwmsjYLRq5U6k51cYv4P4aGDJh3d8KEE8p-AVIlnEY7kSETwle0dMm_B7QJNSDCnliV7Q2D9Odwmx-zCNDHd6UVNEbghr4PmWa4MM6p6_S3-g0mgpnUx7bt28SfjUFb4sowX0/s170/6062421031_cdc5422afa_o-1.jpg" alt="Dead Simple Quiltalong" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Once you have chosen your palette, head on over to the Lily's Quilts Flickr group and share photos of whatever you are using to pull you palette together. Remember, you cannot use the Design Seeds photos on Flickr, so if your palette is chosen from one of those, how about writing a blogpost about it and linking to that post from the Flickr group.