Designing from the floor

People are always asking me how I do it;  how I combine colors, textures, and simply find my ideas.  And I gotta tell ya - most of the time, they find ME.   What happened this morning is a perfect example.   I just got some cool seed bead & Swarovski mixes from Fusion Beads that included not only a pretty turquoise shade, but some lime, and some deep greens as well.  So what do I put with them?  I pulled out my bag of cabs - there are probably about 50 cabs in this bag.  I pulled out some turquoise.  Ok.  Now we're forming a plan.  Then I pulled out a serpentine/pyrite cab in the lime color.  Ok.  But not floating my boat quite yet.  I went through the ENTIRE bag of cabs, looking for the perfect companions for what I knew was going to be Turquoise, Lime and Dark Green.  Finding nothing better - the serpentine/pyrite became the choice.  OR SO I THOUGHT.  I looked down, and on the floor - there it was.  The PERFECT companion for the dark green shade in the seed bead mix, a Moss Agate cab, screaming PICK ME, PICK ME!:

And THAT is how I end up designing most of the time.  I let the pieces tell me themselves when and how they want to be used, and just as with "Vintage Wynter", they tend to turn out more perfectly than when I take the time to plan ahead.  Hence the reason for the box of UFO's!  :0)
So here is the beginning of the next project.  I'm thinking of the peacock theme for this, and matched a few colors to the feathers I keep on hand:

A little more subtle shading than normally seen when designing around the peacock theme, and there really is a bit more lime (more peridot/olive) in the bags than you can see in this photo - but I kind of like it. The lime will be more of an accent than an in your face!  Just gotta wait for the glue to dry on those cabs, and then I'm off to the races!

Peaceful beading,
TTFN