Friday 21 May 2010

Colour!

After I've spent quite some time gathering together an entire collection of all the colourways of the cotton yarn I use, the penny has finally dropped. I love colour. Duh!

Not just colour but graduated, tonal colours and shades together. It's always colour that attracts me to an item, more so than form or function.

It started young - I remember reading through a 1970's craft book and the thing that stuck in my mind to this day is the image of bargello embroidery. It was the shapes but more so the graduations of colour that I loved - and still love to this day.

Hence the latest obsession with colour graduations in my crochet.

Here's a recent project, which has just been sent off to the Med as a birthday gift. Hot and spicy coasters!

3 comments:

Manda Ward said...

Hi Steph - these are just gorgeous - I know exactly what you mean about the Bargello embroidery and the 1970's - my Mum used to subscribe to "Golden Hands" one of those weekly knitting/yarn based craft magazines that build up into a 500 volume encyclopaedia and it was just full of that kind of thing, in just the colours you've used here.
I too am obsessed with colour graduations and colour transitions - a bit like those word puzzles where you have to get from one four letter word to another, by changing only one letter at a time - ie can you get from green to pink in five moves? Do you dye all your cotton, or buy off the shelf - I work a lot with space dyed yarns (mainly from Collinette), but I'd love to do a cotton blanket for my newly decorated bedroom, using all the colours of the rainbow in multiple shades of each hue, but am having difficulty finding a single type of yarn with enough variety of shades. (BTW, I'm waving at you from Falmouth!)

Steph said...

Thanks Manda!
Currently I use Patons 4ply Cotton - lovely feel, great shades, & good value. BUT they don't have a full range of shades. So I'm starting to add in some Yeoman Yarns Cannele 4ply too - full range and on cones, slightly thinner yarn but more sheen. :)

claire said...

Ohh I so agree about colour. Once I get a knit and felt pattern right it's the colours I want to play with.
It took me nearly a year to figure out how to get the colours ro blend the way I could see in my minds eye :O)