Pushing the Envelope

My friend L saved this postcard for me. The catalogue came in the mail the same day. Both have the potential to push my creativity just a little bit further.

The Writes of Spring is a Victorian public library writing competition. They want a postcard sized story--with a definition of story which encompasses all sorts of visual arts. I don't know if I'll enter, but it's good to think about the possibilities. It's also a great reminder to think of my creative work as story telling, whether or not it turns out to be postcard-sized.

The catalogue includes all sorts of things that I probably wouldn't wear and lots and lots of interesting colours. One top that caught my eye comes in

• persian blue
• havana orange
• fuchsia
• sauerkraut
• coral &
• palmolive

 . . . and there are pops of yellow all over the place.

Thankfully I still have my dye pots out and I stocked up on plenty of white wool, so I'm good to go for some more colour mixing. 

So Many Choices

I'm feeling a little overwhelmed this morning. Is there are word for "overwhelmed" in a good way? There are so many options--so many possibilities to try. I can't possibly follow up even half of them.

I've had exploring brown on my to-do list. I printed out a couple of version of this photo and was amazed at what I saw. Then I picked this flower on my walk a few days ago.

The darkest brown dye I have in my library is called red ochre. It's not a bad match for one of the colours here, but there are all sorts of other browns and reds and golden colours too. Even so, it's probably a more realistic starting point than my surprising tree bark. But first I need to finish off and clean up my primary colours and get some of the candle making out of the way. Thankfully there were plenty of banksia flowers on that particular bush. 

Colour Fix Options

I've done a bit of clothes shopping in the past week. Apart from one pretty blue top, everything I could find in a size and style to suit me was black. The alternatives were mostly lime green and tangerine--not colours I can happily wear. This isn't a new challenge and I do have quite a collection of accessories to add the necessary colour to my wardrobe. A bit more prettiness is always in order, though. And the necklines of the tops I bought don't suit my existing necklaces too well. Here's what I made yesterday:

The sea-green feature beads were in my stash. The pretty clear faceted chrystals came from my Christmas stocking. I've made a slightly longer necklace than the ones I normally wear and it has a ten centimetre extension chain so I can vary the length just a bit. As well as earings to match, I had enough beads to make a little pendant. That can go on a silver chain as a low-key alternative to the necklace. The scrap of fabric in the top right of the pic is silk. I hemmed up a 20 cm piece to use as a summer scarf. So that's three possibilities to add colour to my new tops.

Stitch by Stitch

I'm continuing to knit the mohair tubular scarf. Here's where I'm up to this morning.

It's a simple knit: around and around; one stitch at a time. Every stitch is the same--and yet every stitch is different. That's the fascination for me. I love the steady repetition and the subtle colour changes.

 . . . by the way, this is knit on 3.5 mm needles, so on my screen at least the pic is bigger than life size.

Up Close

My cup day rose has taken up residence on my kitchen table. It's slowly opening. 

I decided to have a close look at the colours. The rose is called "dutch gold". I can see various shades of yellow from deep gold through to a pale lemon. And there are touches of red-pink there too. The gold deepens to a warm orange and some of the petals look just as if I'd dropped a couple of grains of my red dye on a wet patch of fabric--lovely! 

Confession

After browsing India Flint's book for a short while yesterday  I reverted to my usual bright colour choices. The yarn is a cotton which I painted using thickened procion dyes. I made a complete colour wheel out of the skein.

And yes, that's another crochet flower in the making--I seem to have developed a habit!

Good Things

I went for a walk with my friend A yesterday afternoon. It's becoming a bit of a Sunday tradition. I picked this geranium for its intense red colour. Thankfully I spotted the home owner just as I turned back to reach over her fence! After asking permission I was encouraged to take a cutting as well as the flower.

I'm interested in how the red deepens almost to black in the centre of the petals. In the light of all my yarn flower brooches, I'd also like to take a closer look at the shape of the petals and how they are formed. Not that I'm going to make a realistic flower, but it's always good to study the real thing.

Colour Cooincidence

I found this little collection on my table this morning: 

Okay, so it wasn't arranged just like that. The garlic bulb is still waiting for me to have a go at a colour sketch. The lavender sprig I picked up on my walk yesterday afternoon--I took advantage of a rare sunny afternoon to take the dogs out. And the bobbin of wool is some spinning: hand dyed merino in various textures which I was experimenting with last night. 

Colour of a Different Kind

Cooking for one, day after day, isn't my favourite task. I tend to either keep it simple--you can fit several different food groups into a toasted sandwich quickly and easily--or cook up a family sized batch of something or other and freeze portions for another time. One thing I don't do often enough is fresh salads. A few lettuce leaves on the plate doesn't count. The topic came up in conversation yesterday when I was talking about the frustrations of grocery shopping. Just recently I walked in to the fresh food section of a local supermarket, basket in hand, looking for something to turn into dinner. After several minutes of wandering around, I put down the basket and walked out again. I just couldn't get enough thoughts together in my mind to pick out the right combination of ingredients to turn into something both attractive and realistic. On the other hand--perhaps as a reaction to my previous failure to choose--I came home the next day with several fresh beetroot bulbs . . . and no plan for them. My friend L is a trained foodie. She too has the challenge of cooking for one. I asked her what I could do with fresh beetroot. She suggested something like this: Grated beetroot and carrot; chopped celery and spring onion; a bit of grated ginger root and some orange slices--wow! It was chewy and satisfying. It was interesting enough to justify a side-trip to the greengrocer on my way home. And in case you're thinging I'm all too virtuous, I added some crispy bacon for a salty protein boost. I was so excited that I took a photo!

Colour Run Fun

I went shopping for inspiration on Sunday. I have a project in mind, but at this stage the parameters are open. It's a chance to experiment and play. After looking through my own fabric collection, I decided to go out and see what I could see. One fabric in particular caught my eye. It was unlabelled and unpriced. Turns out it was going out on clearance because the colour tends to run in the first few washes. I liked the pattern and the price enough to buy it and see what happens.

Here it is after three long hot washes in my machine without soap: It was originally red and white--not any more, but I like it. The next test is to see if the colour stops running--otherwise it could be too much of a menace in real life. I'll run it through the machine again--with laundry powder this time--and then test it with some white fabric.

Book Bonanza

By yesterday afternoon I was feeling tired, slow and sad. It's been a big week and I was running out of steam. On days like that I can't wait for it to be bed-time--even though there's no guarantee I'll be able to sleep when I get there. Filling in the last few hours of the day can be a real challenge. Enter the local library: I dropped in to see what I could find about silk painting. The Community Quilt project I'm working with will involve some silk; and we're planning for the women to decorate scarves for themselves. While I was there I checked out the catalogue for anything on Indigo dyeing. That drew a blank, but I did score several books on colour and a dyeing manual. By the time I'd picked up some groceries for tea and driven home via one of the other branch libraries to collect their contributions, the day was done. I didn't actually read any of these books last night, but just having them on the table was a boost.

Encore!

Just one more pic from the Fashion Parade:

This marveous felted wrap . . . I'm sorry, I don't have any details. All I can tell you is that it's felted and its WOW!

Apart from the colour, it's the drape and texture of this piece that impress me most. It seems that felting is getting more and more popular and more and more subtle. There's one day set aside for felting in our Spinning course. My first reaction was, "why a day of felting, when there's so much to learn about spinning?", but now I'm looking forward to getting just a taste of this versatile craft.

Colours

I had to buy a new printer yesterday. The old one is incompatible with the operating system on my new computer. That was disappointing, annoying, frustrating . . . especially because it took me a fair bit of fiddling to work out where the problem was. During that process I found myself looking into the workings of the printer several times, and just for the sake of a smile amidst the angst, here it is: Primary colours! All the subtleties of colour my printer can produce come from these little cartridges: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Just those basic primary colours: red, blue, yellow--they haven't changed since primary school--and just to prove the point, when I nearly ran out of black ink, the computer asked me whether I would like to produce black by using the colour cartridges.

Here's one of the ways I prefer to think about colour--when I'm not doing battle with my "labour-saving technology":

I love colour, I love colour wheels, I love colour theory, I love to play with colours. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to the fun and exciting aspects of colour again now that I've tackled my technology challenges.