Colours - but no pictures, sorry.

I've been thinking a lot about colours.  I've read several blog posts by others and there have been forum topics on both Folksy and Artfire, about colour and trends.
Apparently the 'in' colour for 2011 is honeysuckle.  This provoked an interesting discussion on Artfire as many people, myself included, thought of honeysuckle as a yellow colour.  Someone, however, posted links and photos of gorgeous pink honeysuckle, and the colour described as honeysuckle is a very attractive pink.

Some time ago I discovered a website, part of Adobe,  http://kuler.adobe.com  This website helps you to create colour combinations either by picking the colours yourself or from photos/pictures you can upload, or fetch from sites like Flickr. You can also search and view other peoples' swatches.
I had forgotten all about it until I read another blog post about colour, which included a link to a site that made colour swatches from your uploaded photos.  I tried but failed to get it to upload any photos and was giving up in despair and about to try Google to see if there was an alternative when I remembered Kuler.
So this afternoon I whiled away a happy hour playing with it and saved some swatches from various photos on my computer.
I've just spent another fruitless half hour trying to find a way to reproduce these swatches. I was able to save them as files onto my computer, and I have tried every programme I have to open them, however they are 'Adobe Swatch Exchange Files' and nothing will open them.   I assumed that I could open them in Adobe programmes eg Illustrator but I can't!

So here is a link to my Kuler page if you are interested in seeing my swatches. I will continue to search for a way to print out my swatches, and maybe I will see if there is another similar programme somewhere that will let me do this and save the results in a format I can print from.
For now I will have to keep the computer open beside me as I play with clay to see if I can reproduce the colours... watch this space...

Polymer Clay Disaster!

Over the weekend I made a lovely set of beads, I was really pleased with them.  I left them to harden up a bit overnight before I made holes and baked them.
So what did I do? I baked them without even making small guide holes for the drill (a small hand drill).  I've done that before and managed to make the holes afterwards, but it is always easier if I at least do guide holes.  When there are no guide holes you have to be careful to drill in from both sides or when the drill comes out the other side it can break off a chunk of clay.
I started with the largest bead and thought I was doing fine till the drill came out the other side and...  yes broke off a chunk of clay.  I was so cross.  It was only a small piece and I thought if I use a spacer at each side it won't show.   The middle size round beads drilled fine.  Then I started on the small beads and after the first three broke up completely when I started drilling I gave up!  I don't quite know why this happened but I have to just put it down to experience.

The photo isn't very good - the background of the beads is pale green.  I'm hoping I can make some more but the pale green was mixed from white and a bit of left over leaf green so I don't expect I'll be able to match it exactly.  Of course I should be really organised and record proportions and keep samples of mixed colours but I've never been that organised...
Oh well, onward and upward... well onward anyway!