3KCBWDAY1: Colour Lovers

I'm somewhat ill-prepared for this - it was only after Hoxton's post (I love her Electric Sheep podcast) earlier on today that I realised this was happening again this year, and I hadn't missed it...  It's only a week, I thought, when I signed up at lunchtime... and then I looked at the prompts for the week...

But this evening's is relatively easy.  Colour... shutting me up about colour is easier.

As an example, this is a quick snap of my dining room/door into the living-room taken after I came in this evening (work bag still on the table, but as it's Monday night there isn't a heap of post and other detritus on there...).  I love bright, vibrant colours.  I like to think I don't "do" subtle.  There's weaving, knitting, feltmaking, crochet, embroidery, cross-stitch and stained-glass visible there, and it's all pretty bright...

(It seems that after a brief heady period where Blogger and Flickr frolicked happily together, they're completely incompatible in any of my 3 browsers.  Apologies.  It's taken me over 2 hours to work this out...)

I have Views on certain objects.  Work shoes, my everyday small handbag, my everyday coat, camera bags and my favourite small-project knitting bag need to be black, or as near black as readily obtainable.  Likewise most of the work wardrobe.

This is mainly to provide a backdrop for other things though - nice knitted items; excellent not-everyday-small bags; cool jewellery.  Excellent curtains and beautiful cushions. (The cushions aren't made by me - Wibbo saw my pathetic attempts at crochet and made these two utterly beautiful pillow-sized ones...)

Commuting from a flat Fenland village to central London, for 4-5 months of the year I leave home in the dark and I arrive home in the dark.  I see grey, grey daylight through office windows and on the occasions I force myself to walk on cold streets at lunchtime.

I have colours I gravitate towards; I'm a fan of purple, and burgundy, and magenta; and jade, and turquoise, and aquamarine.  But now I realise I also love golds and yellows, leaf greens and even, god help me, sometimes browns and neutrals.  I think the greyness actually helps to make the idea of colour more valuable.

When yarn clubs work (and there are currently a couple of infamous examples of dysfunctional ones from one UK source), they're brilliant.  They take you out of your little corner and present you with something new - you wouldn't have chosen this one off a table if there was, say, purple, around, but once presented with it in a parcel,on its own, your mind starts reeling with the possibilities. I'm currently signed up to the second part of Yarnscape's Wheel of the Year club, and to a Clan Surprise from The YarnYard; both have opened my mind to the possibilities of less intense colours in the past few months, and beautifully so.