Playing with colors: the Bobo ball

For my latest temari, I took color inspiration from one of my favorite birds: the Blue-crowned Motmot. It's also known as pajaro bobo, what one might translate as dummy bird. If it is overly trusting of people, that just gives us more opportunity to consider its lovely color combination. By the way, motmots are not sexually dimorphic—the male and female look identical. First I used a fun site called Kuler to create a color palette from a photo. It's surprising to see how many different colors are actually on the bird, including some shades I hadn't noticed. Unfortunately Kulur will only make a palette of 5 colors because the bobo has many more than that, but it was a good starting point.

   Next I got out my thread collection and chose those colors I had that best match the bird. (Naturally I felt like I need more colors of thread.) I stitched on a ball that is such a dark blue that it looks almost black. The design of this sampler temari with 20 faces is the April challenge on the Temari Challenge, a Yahoo group.

I filled most of the faces with kiku (chrysanthemum stitch) and with five-pointed stars, trying to use as many different color combinations as I could. Around the equator, I stitched pine-needle stitches in one of the predominant colors of the bobo. So here you have it, my homage to the bobo.