New Project: Colour Planning Made Easy!

Hi everyone! 

The busy time is starting to finally tail off around here - I ended up leaving the Law Society job because it was too much for the fatigue monster to manage, then got a sizeable crochet order finished, and now the Carousel CAL has settled into a nice sedate rhythm (can't wait until we get to play with pentagons next week!). 

So, I've had a bit of a chance to pull out some long-considered ideas about how to make things easier for myself to plan out colours for crochet project. 

How many of us have done this before to work out a rainbow, or grades of colour for a project?

It's messy, takes up a lot of space, and gets yarn ends all tangled up (or at least it does for me). I've seen Lucy's gorgeous peg system, and a few other similar ideas (yarn wrapped on embroidery thread cards, paddlepop sticks, etc etc) but I don't think those would suit me. I need really secure, solid colour samples, that pack up really small and light, and to avoid using my terrible handwriting on anything! 

I do have the Stylecraft Special DK shade card (now somewhat out of date)...

...but it's not great for seeing how different colours look together. 

The solution? Two inch, two-row solid granny squares in each colour, with the colour name and number stapled on the back! I started with the new Stylecraft Batik range to see if it would work (only 16 colours at the moment).

Ta-dah! The staples are really secure, but barely show on the front of the square. I made a little chain string for them out of scrap yarn and a button, and now they are hanging on one of my drawer handles, ready to pick colours! 

Next stop: the Special DK, which currently has 74 colours (gulp).

In anticipation of getting around to doing this, I've been making a solid granny square out of each colour as I pick them up to work something. There's... 30 so far. A long way to go, but once it's done it should be far far easier to choose colours for a project! My husband is tracking down a large hinged plastic or metal ring that I can string the squares onto, so it's easier to just open the ring at the colour you want rather than having to pull them all off. 

EDIT: Giant Hinged Rings are called Jailer's Keyrings! Thanks craftymummy! 

Now, I am spoiled by mostly working in my fave Stylecraft yarns, but if you have a range of brands in your stash, you could mix up all the colours of the same weight (just add the brand and "model" to the paper tag) and put them all on one ring! 

Do you have a colour sample collection like this? Would it be useful to your project planning?