Domesticali

Colour Collaborative : September : Earth

My Father showed me how to perform all manner of practical tasks when I was fairly young. He being of the generation who knew how to fix stuff, and being an engineer to boot.

And I made a most willing apprentice - I loved the mystery of the toolbox - its tiny compartments filled with all manner of small, shiny treasures. And the pegboard wall at his office, with the tools neatly outlined, so you could tell which belonged where. I loved their names and their totally specific purposes, and the feeling of responsibility in being allowed to handle something sharp or otherwise dangerous.

But some things made no sense. Like plug wiring. Brown - live, blue - neutral, green and yellow - earth, he explained. Nooooo, surely he had this wrong. How had we not all been electrocuted? Any small child will tell you, the colour of the earth should have been a rich, soil-y brown. Green made better sense for live - like plants, living. 

It didn't matter how patiently he told me that the system was planned to provide the lowest possible likelihood of mix ups, even if the electrician was colour blind. Intuitively, it still felt all wrong to me.

If the colour collaboratives were responsible for allocation of hues to the wires, we might not agree on the shades we used - neutral might be a soft grey or taupe, possibly charcoal, live would lead to a brisk debate - do we go neon bright, or more predictably bold red for danger? But I'm pretty cretain that faced with a choice, earth would have been brown all the way.

 

Don't forget to check out the other great 'Colour Collaborative' blogs for more of today's posts, just click on the logos below ...




What is The Colour Collaborative? All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.

 

Colour Collaborative: August: Vintage

Hubs and I bought our first house in 1995, the deposit saved from an entire year of my hard earned salary. I'm sure I've told you that story before -  four hours a day, commuting through the Tokyo rush hour and the thing that kept me going on days when the white gloved platform pushers were shoving us into the carriages like cattle was the mantra of 'one more brick, one more brick'.

It took six months from returning to the UK to find the house we wanted to buy - a Victorian semi in a  good part of town, with a long thin garden and most important to me, stairs I could climb to bed. As we house hunted, I read interiors magazines and dreamed of what our home would be like. One thing was for sure, we didn't want it to resemble the homes of our parents - it was going to be fresh, timeless, classic.

Of course now, as I look back on those notebooks now, I smile at how dated some of our ideas of 'fresh and classic' look now.  And the super irony? I realise that my parents now live in the epitome of a mid century modern, hipster's dream pad.

My mother's kitchen accessories are the exact orange my design savvy friend just picked out for her kitchen. Bar cart? Tick. Ercol furniture? Oh yes. Parquet floor in pristine condition - they have it. Even those West German lava pottery floor lamps - though my mother swears now that she probably bought them from Argos. Every once in a while, I will spot an element of their home in some emporium and rush to phone them and let them know what their tea, coffee and sugar canisters are worth on  the vintage market!

 

Who knows, if we had waited twenty years to get on the property ladder, I might have been gagging to re-create their look. Because I'm not averse to a spot of vintage chic. It is useful, living in a fairly new build house, as we now do, to inject a bit of patina of the past. Stops everything looking as if you just swooped along the high street acquiring all your household necessities in one go, thereby sentencing you to a definite design graveyard at some point in the future. Though thinking about it, if you did that and just hung tight, you'd probably turn vintage chic again at some point in the future.

The colours of that era are easy to pinpoint in my mind - orange and brown, harvest gold, avocado. Poof - imagine that lot and you're straight back to the 70's, your feet snuggled in a shag pile rug and a spider plant in a macrame hanger. When we bought our first home? It was beige all the way - the magnolia years. With curtain poles, not tracks - very important.

 And what about now - when our current interior choices are examined in the cold light of hindsight. Will the cliche of white with 'pops' of colour scream vintage 2010s? Or perhaps it will be the Cath Kidston bright pastel palette. I strongly suspect the oh so personal statement feature wall will be a marker, as will my beloved antlers. And let's not forget bunting.

Because vintage, where colour is concerned, speaks to me in the same way as the dictionary still defines it in the context of wine - from a certain year. 

Put your time travelling specs on - what are your interior palette future clichés of the moment?

What is The Colour Collaborative? All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when they work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We will be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways. We're excited by where this might take us, click on the logos below to find out!

 

Colour collaborative: July: Summer

Summer? Well, it all begins with the preparation. Spangly nail polish, in my case.

Which is an odd place to start an exploration of Summer colours, given that grey (silver, if you are feeling kind) is achromatic. A colour without hue, not found in the visible spectrum. 

But the beauty of achromatic colours is their ability to play off their surroundings, enhancing the other shades and making them sing.

And so it is with Summer. When rather than controlling life in order to meet obligations, there is the freedom to roll with it, to explore whatever presents itself and to take the time to soak it in.

A week in Portugal was bound to throw up some good summer colour. Vivid, life enhancing.

But there  was time for subtlety too, for the glaucous, sun bleached shades of sea holly on the dunes.

And the eggshell underbelly of a new friend.

Freedom, it seems, comes in many shades.

All of them glorious.

What is The Colour Collaborative? All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when they work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. Starting small, with just five members for now, we'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways. We're excited by where this might take us, click on the logos below to find out!

 

Colour Collaborative: June

When Annie at Knitsofacto asked me if I wanted to join in with a blogging project I said 'yes'. If you've been reading here a while, this is probably no great suprise. I am a compulsive joiner-inner. Probably goes with the part of my personality which craves the new and exciting. And quicker than a flash and it is launch post time and I am sitting with a blank screen and the requirement to sum up my attitude towards colour in a well written and possibly witty epistle. 

And the thoughts just aren't flowing. My attitude towards colour? Schizophrenic. Life would be so much simpler if I were more decisive, more loyal to my personal palette. How easy it would be if I knew that all my kitchen accessories should be ice cream sorbet colours. Or that I only wore White Company neutrals. Or that turquoise blue summed up my chakras and should always be my default colour. None of these statements are true. Or rather, they are all true, just not always. And definitely never on consecutive days.

The simple truth is that I just enjoy something different. As long as it isn't purple. I have given myself permission to dislike purple. Oh, unless it is pansies or violas, which are good in purple. And alliums. See the problem? Hard and fast rules on colour just aren't for me.

But exploring colour? Bring it on. Can't wait to get started. Though now I am having second thoughts on choosing green for my logo... the other colours are so beguiling....

What is The Colour Collaborative? All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when they work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. Starting small, with just five members for now, we'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways. We're excited by where this might take us, click on the logos below to find out!