We had some snow yesterday. View to the east from the Garden Room. (This is photo is "as shot" in full color.)

Not as much as some of y'all in the East, but it snowed all day and it was heavy, wet, and very sticky. Our wooded ravine was a wonderland -- this photo captures only a tiny fraction of that (even in wide-angle)!
Anyway, it's February... notoriously cold, gray, and seemingly the longest month of the year, even though it's technically the shortest. My world has been pretty colorful lately (on purpose), at least as far as my knitting/crochet projects go, but I had a reminder the other day that it's sometimes good to take a look at those things in black & white because, especially, shades of gray.
While I was prepping my Safe At Home post for IG yesterday, I accidentally swiped and... I don't really know how these things happen... and voila, black & white.

Every once in a while, Cara posts a reminder to take a look in black & white because you can more easily see the VALUE of those colors and how they work together. Admittedly, I did not do that with Safe At Home, so I was very happy to see that there was pretty good balance overall. There are a few places where the windows and/or door fade right into the house or the stripes are a big glob of light, medium, or dark, or you can't tell the roof from the sky, but it's all pretty well distributed throughout.
Anyway, it prompted me to look at some current projects in a similar way.


These are the circles from yesterday. (BTW, the little circles will all eventually have a few more rounds in another color, just like the ones above them, and then they'll all have another round or two in natural to make them into hexagons, and then I'll use a JAYGO technique to Join As You Go!)
Anyway, isn't that interesting?? That gray & gold circle at top right was a little surprising, and I'd have thought there'd be more contrast in the blue & yellow one at bottom left. I love that some of the tiny circles are of mixed value... especially that green one at the right.
Here's the value of the box of yarn from yesterday's post:

I got a new craft bin in which to store that project, wound up the rest of the yarn, culled some of the repeats (either super similar or same color/different dye lot), added the neons back in (because, let's just see...).

The goal was light, medium, dark starting from the bottom. I rearranged, took a photo, looked in b&w/monochrome; rearranged, took a photo, looked; rinse & repeat... I took a crazy number of photos! And I see that I could still make adjustments (until the cows come home). The discerning eye will spot the "dark value sequins" atop a "light value yarn." Haha. This is a multi-craftual household.

Here's that image in full color!
The next thing I'm going to do is another thing I just learned from Cara (who learned from another) is to enter all these colors/values into the Granny Squares Color Pattern Generator, along with some info about my pattern, and have a nicely balanced random plan generated for me!! That will take a little planning and screen time, but I think it will be well worth it! And there's a 3-day weekend on tap. Yahoo!
What are your weekend plans?