When I’m teaching Fair Isle knitting, I get asked a lot about the best way to choose colours. I have a lot to say on this subject. But, first and foremost I believe

Play is essential!

For this post, I’m focusing on the kind of play that is becoming seamless with our modern lives. Playing on our phones. Got a few minutes to kill? Play with some colourful Apps on your phone and then later, take that fun and apply it to your stash. Two of my favourite apps for playing with Fair Isle colour ideas are Kaleidomatic and Adobe Kuler  (or Adobe Kuler for your desktop).

I will demonstrate how I use Kuler in my next post; today I’ll show you some of my fun in Kaleidomatic. Here’s how Kaleidomatic works. I took a picture of this 1970’s Swedish embroidery. (My house is filled with textile inspiration. If someone hand-made a thing, I find it hard to resist buying in a market.) Pop it into the app. The app has a number of different filters which put the pattern into kaleidoscopic repeat, like the one at the top of the post.

This is a pretty cool video showing it in action: (I wish I had an iPad to use it on instead of just my phone.)

Some of the kaleidoscopic repeats look so much like fair isle tam tops. Even more so, when you feed segments of fair isle examples in.

It is brilliant for looking at the natural world with a Fair Isle eye. (Could that be – Fair Isle Eye for the Knit Guy? – I want my own knitting show)

I could go on showing you examples from my photo library, but I think you’ll have more fun playing with it yourself. Let me know what you discover.

Next post, I’ll show you how I choose a colour palette based on my Kaleidomatic pictures.