Working out colour placement of motifs

I've made quite a few 1970's design shawls using Twilley's Goldfingering now but I have so many leftovers in a whole range of colours that would look great as a multi-coloured version of this design.

I could make them colour coordinated i.e. various shades of blue, various shades of red/pink or I could make them truly multi-coloured.  Working things out I have decided that I want to make two new versions, one for 5 different colour flowers and one for 9 different colour flowers as these numbers fit with the number of motifs required overall.

I want to make them so that the same colour flower is not next to itself in any direction but I don't want to have to use little pieces of paper to help me sort that one out, its too busy in our house for that, the bits of paper would get wafted about and messed up.

Light bulb moment! I have some Cross Stitch software, Jane Greenoff's Cross Stitch Gold, that I've not used in a while that I could utilise to help me sort it out.  I am also a fan of Suduko and using methods employed in those I have managed to figure out the placement without too much stressing and cursing.

Because I do a lot of Cross Stitching as well as running a business and being a busy mom I have been able to match all the different colours of Twilley's Goldfingering to the nearest colour of DMC embroidery thread and so can use those colour numbers in the software to see how a shawl may look when finished.  Clever eh!

I've saved these as working files so that when I want to see how a shawl would look I can just go in and change the colour of the flowers in the colour palette at the bottom, one at a time, which changes all instances of that colour in the design.

This is a screen shot of the layout for the 5 colour of flower version.

This is a screen shot of the layout for the 9 flower colour version.

Keep a look out for multi-coloured versions of the shawl in the future.