Continuing with my designs

When designing my rugs, I often look to various things for my inspiration.  It may be an antique rug as was the case with my Gloria design or the covers of books, which was the case with my Libby design.  My Leah rug was inspired by circular antique rugs and blended with colors to match my Amanda rug.
Sometimes, an idea calls to me and I can't wait to design it.  My Libby is one of those.  I saw the basic design embossed in gold on the cover of a book, then drew the center motif to go with it.  The curves of both complemented each other well.  The border was inspired by some lace that I had and the motif in the corners reminded me of the fleur-de-lis seen so often in France.  
Probably, the hardest part of any design, is choosing the colours.  All of my patterns are designed with DMC colours so I purchased a DMC color card made with real threads to help me with this.  I first choose colours that look good to me on the computer and design with those.  Of course, the computer colour never looks like the real thing, so once I am done with the design, I look carefully at them all on my colour card.  Often, what looks good together on the computer, also looks good in real-life but sometimes the colours or shades are too close together and get lost beside each other.  At times you want this to happen when you are shading something, but many times you don't, so I change the colour to something similar.  My daughter, Cheryl, is very good helping me when I get stuck on a colour.  I also downloaded a colour wheel to help me choose complimentary colours.
I have also found when designing my rugs, that I am more comfortable designing shapes and curves than flowers, so I began focusing on those.  I will still do flowers from time to time, but will begin focusing on non-flower rugs for the most part.