colors

I have been thinking about my approach to color. Not the color for the walls, color for weaving projects, or spinning/dyeing projects, or the "painting with felt" that I did for the breakfast room seat covers. I learned this in my weaving class with Sylvia. She had us do an exercise where we took a picture of something in nature or (even better) an actual object from nature and extracted the colors from it. Try it. You will be amazed at what colors are there. You think that rock is grey? Look more carefully. You might see pink, purple, tan and grey. If it looks good in the rock it will look good in yarn!

It is difficult to do this at first. I was so used to looking at things and KNOWING what color they were. Sky is blue, trees are green, those flowers are purple, rocks are grey. Once I was given the assignment to look at only the colors and then put them on paper using colored pencils or crayons (pencils are better since they have more "mixable" colors) it was surprising. Colors I didn't expect became obvious. Not just different shades, but a wide range of colors. I first couldn't believe I would be able to get the colors on paper. "Colored pencils don't come in those colors. An artist with a wide variety of paints would be able to do it, but not me. I just have a small, basic box of colored pencils."

Yes, I must admit, this was one of the exercises I resisted. But I did it. And I was able to reproduce the colors with pencils. Even better, I was able to find yarns in the yarn cabinet that matched the colors! Now, this yarn cabinet has yarns that have been mostly donated to the class. Much of it is yarn of 70s colors and rug weight, but there are others, too, some nice, some horrifying! I rarely use them, preferring my own yarns. This makes sense when I am using handspun, but even when I am using commercial yarn I have a hard time finding anything I can use in the cabinet. It's kind of like shopping at Ross--a big mess with the perfect item somewhere, but a little overwhelming because of the volume and the number of rejects. Anyway, I thought I wouldn't be able to find the yarns in the cabinet. I was wrong. And it wasn't just me. Everyone in class was able to reproduce the colors in their card with mostly yarns from the cabinet.

I also found it freeing to select yarns and colors without a project in mind. I haven't ever made anything with the yarns I put on the card, it was just an exercise. But, I have used the technique in other projects. The blanket I made for my sister, for example, came from a picture of a stand of trees in autumn.