Stash diving to match my color palette

In my last post (way too long ago!), I showed my color palette for an upcoming Margaret Bendig class.

With my Antelope Canyon pictures in mind, my first task was to find an overdyed thread for the dividing bands between the many blocks in the project. In Margaret's original, she used three strands of a floss-weight thread. I decided to take the easy (lazy?) way out, and instead looked for a heavier-weight thread. With a larger thread, I could use just one strand, and wouldn't have to lay miles of long-arm cross. In this search, I felt a bit like Goldilocks:

• Perle-5-weight threads (Watercolours or Overture):  Too Heavy!
• Perle-12-weight threads (Wildflowers):  Too Skimpy!
• Perle-8-weight threads (Impressions):  Just Right! So I bought some, in "Flame".

With my border color in hand, I checked out available canvas colors. While there isn't much bare canvas in the project, some does peek through in areas, so I wanted a canvas color that would go with my palette. A floss toss (with only my border color) led me to buy a very large square of lavender canvas.

At this point, I hadn't found any other threads. Once home, I headed for my stash. I discovered that I have a LOT of lavender threads, but had a few in other colors. Here's what I came up with:

Perhaps it's not the best practice to go about making major color decisions like border and canvas colors (and actually starting to stitch with them!) before finding the rest of your threads. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but I like to think that doing things like this will help challenge my color and design sense. Time will tell if some of this has been a colossal mistake, but it will be a fun mistake!

As you can see, I'd already started the borders when the picture above was taken, but I'll save the pictures of border progress for another post!