Torment

I don’t know about you, but I torment myself every time I need to choose a color palette.  I pick a main color with a secondary color in mind, but something about the secondary color does not work, e.g. no beads, wrong size, wrong finish, or just a bad match.  In this case I expected to use turquoise beads with my slab turquoise but all of my turquoise beads are too blue.  I intended to use red coral in this piece too, so I looked at my red beads, here I mostly ran into too pink and the wrong finish- I want a matte opaque for the colored beads.  Which brought me around to the choice I should have made in the first place, silver.  Of course I now have to choose between three shades of “silver:” bright silver, steel, and smokey opaque grey.  I think the steel is going to be my main silver. 

In addition, I chose some blues and greens for accents.  I also picked out all of my red coral (and one red glass) for larger accents.

This is why I have a whole set of bookmarks titled color.

Classic South Western color palette

I also went through a large stack of clippings for inspiration for the composition of the multi-strand part of the necklace.

A second view of the classic South Western color palette