So, today is the first day of the Knit and Crochet Blogging Week and I completely forgot all about it. I've been meaning to post a lot of things this past couple of weeks but what passes for normal life around this place completely consumed me.
Colour. Some people love it, some love only certain colours and others don't seem to care. My father was a man who believed that standing out from the crowd was horribly vulgar and therefore would have been happy for my mother and I to wear beige for the whole of our lives. He should really have been prepared when I emerged into the world with hair roughly this colour:
There was no way I was going to merge into the background so, even if the hair colour faded, my love of colour as a whole remained. It didn't hurt that I grew up in the Middle East, a riot of noise and colour; the Cloth and Gold Markets were favourite haunts of mine and I soon learned from my mother to sew the gorgeous fabrics that were all around. Knitting came later as yarn was unobtainable.
Colour also brings memories, just as smell and taste do. Navy is not a colour that lives in my wardrobe, bringing back the memories of school, right down to the gruesome navy knickers. It's a colour of conformity to me, of mediocrity, of fading into the background - a respectable colour. Perhaps my hatred of navy is a kick over the traces at the whole stultifying idea of fitting in, not standing out, wondering what others might think or say. My own personal mini-rebellion.
Black, however, is a staple of my wardrobe, despite or perhaps because of my love of colour. I learned the beauty of a capsule wardrobe on a trip to Gibraltar when in the Royal Navy Reserves when both normal and tropical uniforms, computer manuals and, right down the list, a few civilian clothes all had to be transported within the confines of commercial airline baggage allowance. Black came to the rescue and it has been my staple ever since.
If you remove colour from the equation, you get to play with texture. In cloth, you can have the sheen of satin, the glow of silk, the beautiful feel and look of velvet amongst many others. In knitting, you can play with texture too, with cables or stitch patterns or complicated lace. However, I tend to use my miriad textures of black as a background for the colour of my knitting and that too can experiment with texture.
I realise, though, that all colours are not equal in my wardrobe or my stash. My favourite colours are purple and green and those dominate with the occasional outburst of other colours. And this in-yer-face pink on the left is truly an outburst. You're not going to fade into the background with a shawlette or scarf in this colour. A colour for a confident day or a day when you want to feel or look confident.
Rarely, if ever, do I mix colours. Perhaps I'm a bit afraid to do so, still remembering my father's fear of standing out - to the extent where he refused to walk down the street with his fashion-forward sister wearing the latest London style. I don't trust my own sense of colour, preferring to stay with my black background and single colour knitwear. I trust to my favourite dyers to mix the colours for me, often remaining within the same colour families I know and trust. As knitters, we soon acquire our favourites, those dyers and suppliers who have similar tastes with colour and texture, the all-important handle of the stuff - whether yarn or fabric - that makes you want to feel it next to your skin and hug it to yourself. But colour is what first draws us in, particularly on the internet with all its hits and misses; we've all succumbed to the lure of that gorgeous yarn on the screen, only to find its promises of colour false as it arrives in the mail.
I can be more experimental with my socks, my feet remaining mainly out of sight within my boots, a small canvas to have fun with. The cat also seems quite fond of this particular yarn, as can be seen below.
But, then, there are those days, when you just say to heck with everything -
PUT YOUR SUNGLASSES ON, WORLD;
I'M COMING THROUGH!
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