How to pick "random" colours for granny motifs - Tutorial

How to pick "random" colours for granny motifs

At first sight, you may think that the colours on those beautiful crochet grannies blankets are completely random and that the people crocheting them simply and randomly picked up the colours they had at hand. Well, that's not entirely true. The "oh-so-random-look" of the granny squares is often intentional, i.e., most crocheters like their colour choices to appear random, but they plan it that way... What? Planning randomness? What is this madness, I hear you ask? Well, it is the truth. But have no fear, I'll guide you through the easy, simple process.

(Note: if you need help choosing the colours to begin with, there are some tools I find helpful:

1. Always choose one colour for the last row of every motif. White is often the colour of choice for this, but, for a baby blanket, for instance, you may opt for the classical pink or blue or even a light grey;
2. Choosing the remaining colours:
1. COLOURlovers: Website with more than 3 million user-created color palettes to inspire your ideas;
2. Design Seeds: the palettes are often accompanied by inspirational images, so the website is really, really cool;
3. ColorCombos: scroll down to find thousands of palettes, often quite vivid and colourful).

After deciding on your colours and your motif (by the way, have you seen my Granny, Meet the Stripes square?), it's time to create randomness... My tool of choice to create colour-madness is this one:
Granny Squares Color Pattern Generator

Well, as the name says, this website will help randomize the colours you will be using for your granny project. You will need:

- to know the size of your project (width, height);

- to know the colours you will be using in the project (I suggest one for the "border", which will be used in the last round of every motif, and 7/8 additional ones).

My next "granny project" is going to be a granny hexagon top for Little A., but this will still do the trick. I will be needing 18 hexagons and will be using 3 colours per motif (border will be always white). So:

And now, we will be dealing with the colours. I'm using 8 different colours (not counting with the white, since this will only be used in the last round of the hexagon - were I to put it here, and it would also be randomized) and so the next step will be to choose the colours, clicking the black square to open the colour palette and clicking on "add another" when it's time to move unto the next one. My colours look like this:

And let's click GENERATE! :)

My end result is this:

And I guess I'm pretty happy with it. It has the right amount of each colour and I am able to already see the white limiting and linking each motif. The best part is that if you're not happy with the "final" look, you can always compulsively hit the "Generate" button until you are happy with your "totally-not-planned" randomness. With my colours, here are some other possibilities:

So, now, go, spend the next couple of hours at http://granny-square-colors.com/, choosing your randomness and dreaming of yarn! :)