I don’t know about you but sometimes when I’m making jewelry I have a hard time deciding on a color palette.

I wanted to make a necklace with this pendant but when I stood in front of the big wall of beads at my local Jo-Ann’s store I immediately felt overwhelmed.

Too many choices.

Too many colors. Too many materials. Too many sizes.

I knew I wanted something sort of earthy for my goddess… earthy but not dull.

You know how I love color.

That’s when I stumbled upon the strand of beads above. It had lots of earthy colors without being boring.

There is the blue, brown, a coral and orange blend, and black.

All rather earthy without looking like putty or sand or mud.

Earthy, but still colorful.

So with this strand of inspiration beads in my hand I went looking for beads in colors that were in this color palette.

The turquoise blue is great and is definitely a part of the color palette in the inspiration beads.

And if you look you can definitely see this coral color swirled in the inspiration beads.

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I then added a dark brown and a black bead to the pile.

You can see that all of the beads I’ve pulled are colors that are in my inspiration beads.

These four colors might not be colors I would normally choose but because I let the strand of inspiration beads guide me I was able to come up with a color palette that I really like.

I probably won’t use the actual strand of inspiration beads in my finished necklace because I don’t want anything too “glass” looking or too sparkly but I like the glazed ceramic and stone beads I found.

I also like the mixed of sizes and shapes. I have rounds, oblongs, cubes and flatish discs. I’ll have to do another post sharing tips for  mixing sizes and shapes some day.

But…

Now if you find yourself facing that “GIANT wall of overwhelm” you know you can pull together a color palette for your handmade jewelry using one strand of colorful beads as inspiration for your color palette.

[pinit]

If you would like to see a necklace I made with some of these beads just click here: A New Necklace – Combining Chains and Strung Beads.