Flower Power

I've been asked a couple of times where I get my ideas for colour combinations. Aside from having a mom who's an artist and growing up doing art all through school, there are a couple of ways I put together colours.

One way is to take a pattern in a clothing item I already have and pull colours out of it. The other is to copy something I see. The easiest thing for me is to look at nature, especially flowers:
This outfit is a bit of both. The shoes are green, yellow and purple, so duh, that's pretty simple. But I also have a life-long fondness for the flowers that were in the garden of the house I grew up in. I love pansies:Isn't that just gorgeous? You could do purple, white, cream, yellow, fuschia, black and brown - and they'll all go together, because there they are, all in one flower!

As soon as I put this lovely purple shirt next to the shoes, I looked around for some yellow in my wardrobe. I have a lot of pale yellow, but when I held this mustard yellow cami up to the vivid purple, they really popped together:

The softer olive helped tone it down. With flowers, all the greenery acts like a neutral. In an outfit, you don't really have to worry about the green as long as it's the "background" or neutral colour - I wouldn't have done bright green (too much), but I would have done a deeper olive or a forest green.

This iris is another flower that I loved when I was younger:

This is the second wear of my shirt (seen here), the second wear of this skirt (seen here) and also the second wear of these shoes (seen here). Not counting the jewelry, this outfit cost a total of $19.50 - everything was thrifted/consignment.

The stuff:

Those shoes are so fun.

I quite liked all the sparkly stuff:

I was very rattly with the charm bracelet today! Hee! That's a big ring, by the way.

Shirt (H&M, thrifted), cami (Smart Set), skirt (Club Monaco, consignment), shoes (Enzo Angiolini, thrifted), bracelet and necklace (Plum), earrings (vintage), ring (Guess).