Apparently I can’t resist a photo project where color is the focus. For the LOVE of COLOR week just ended, and I have had so very much fun looking for the brightest colors (spring green, fuchsia, orange, yellow, royal blue, purple, and bright red). Spring seems to finally be close, and this week of super saturated, cheery colors has gotten my mind even more primed for some springtimey goodness.
This week’s color for the sixty four colors project was timberwolf, a gray crayon that I definitely don’t remember from my many childhood days spent coloring. After looking at the super fun Crayola timeline, I discovered that timberwolf was added in 1993. So even though that may have been still firmly in my coloring heydays, I’m almost positive that my little plastic briefcase of 96 crayons had been mine for quite some time. AKA, I didn’t need new crayons after 1993 and probably never had a timberwolf one.
Anyway! It’s a very pale gray, and it felt like the whole world was timberwolf this past week. So it was fitting as we wind down the end of winter.
Macaroni and cheese was an interesting color this week for sixty-four colors. It’s a very warm yellowy orange. And a lot of my hesitance was more about the fact that this color definitely didn’t exist when I was a kid. But I love that they let kids vote on the names for the new colors, and I’m sure as a kid this would have been groundbreaking stuff. In the end, I only found one new shot for this color last week, but I found some pretty good matches in the archives (and from that trip to the beach on Presidents Day!).
Blue violet is one of my favorite crayons. It’s purple enough to be pretty, but blue enough to not be quite so, well, PURPLE. It was harder to find in real life, perhaps because I wanted to get it perfect. And trust me, these two photos from the Gap are not perfect, but in real life, they were precisely blue violet. And then you’ve got some flowers because purple flowers are pretty nice.
As I finished the last rows on the scarf I made for Dan for Christmas, I realized with a jolt that I haven’t made a scarf for MYSELF in a very, very long time. I used to crochet scarves a lot. Because crochet is so mindnumbingly relaxing. And because while I’m not the word’s best crocheter, I sure have mastered the long, narrow rectangle. Anyway. I looked back in the archives and discovered that I was right, and I haven’t made myself a scarf in four years. (Unless you count the only thing I ever made from the Happy Hooker book, which I don’t, not really.)
So it was past time to make myself a scarf. I decided it should be aqua and red, partly because it’s an awesome combination, and partly because I have a red winter coat and I have a brand new turquoise down vest waiting impatiently in my closet for the weather to get warmer and all this damn snow to melt. I’m nothing if not practical, people.
And as I polled the universe about how to arrange my stripes, a challenge emerged. My own mother dared me to crochet my scarf in a completely random pattern. I should toss my carefully randomized graph-paper rendering. And ignore mathematical sequences like Fibonacci numbers, or the random stripe generator. No, she dared me to just wing it. Because I think the thought of me struggling over what counts as really random made her giggle. Friends advised me to drink copiously while working. And I learned that I’m not the only one who feels a little creepy-crawly when thinking about a scarf whose ends don’t mirror each other.
Is my brain really that inherently ordered? (I’m of course thinking back to that fateful personality test we took at that librarian workshop. You know, the one where I was deemed to be the gold personality – the rule-following, order-loving, organized one. The geeky, stick-in-the-mud, no-fun-for-you one! Not the creative, emotional, sensitive one! Or the logical, questioning, scientific one! And surely not the outgoing, party-lovin’, loud one.)
Crocheting the scarf turned out to be quite the mental challenge. With each new stripe, my brain started whirring. “Okay, the red stripe you just finished was two rows. I did a blue stripe with two rows before that one. Am I putting in a pattern of two-row stripes here? Am I using red enough? Maybe I need a really, really big blue section here instead. And after that a short blue row with some longer red ones. No! Short red ones. No! One long red one and one short blue one and then a short red one and a short blue one. No! That’s a pattern!”
It was EXHAUSTING.
After I measured out to just past where I thought the middle should go, I decided it would be a good idea to count the rows of each color, just to make sure I wasn’t using way too much of one color or the other. So I counted the rows at the point where the above picture was taken.
And to my utter HORROR, there were EXACTLY 50 rows of red and 50 rows of aqua. And I DIDN’T DO IT ON PURPOSE. I was trying to be random! My brain IS that inherently organized?
I’m so embarrassed.
But I kept going, and at the very end counted the rows again to make sure I’d end up with the same number of rows of each color. I suppose that’s against the spirit of the project, but even I have my limits.
In the end, I’m pretty happy with the result. Is it a little TOO overly long? Yes. Does it need some breaking in thanks to the cheap yarn? Yes, especially compared to the pashmina style scarves I’m used to. Am I totally psyched with the random-ness of the stripes? Hell yes. Will I embark on another “random” project soon? Probably not, no. And that’s okay with me.
I was surprised upon looking back at the photos I took yesterday at the boardwalk that I spotted so much cheery yellow on what was a very cold, very gloomy, very gray kind of day. I really like that.
There’s something about you in wintertime. Maybe it’s simply because that’s not when we’re supposed to want to visit you. But I’ve been taking trips to see you (and to take photos) in the dead of winter for years now, and since I had today off for Presidents’ Day, and there’s still so much snow on the ground, I figured why not take the trip? The truth is, I often feel a lot of pressure to use days off to find something really spectacular to take pictures of, just because I have the time to drive to wherever I want to go, and of course, the daylight. But I get into these routines, and Asbury Park has quickly become one of my most frequent photo-taking destinations. Of course, looking at these pictures, I remember why all over again.
Anyway, thanks for the inspiration. And the cold toes. And the fresh air. I kinda like you.
Love,
Elizabeth
Pacific Blue was this week’s crayon for sixty-four colors, and it proved to be a little tricky. Or, I’m a perfectionist. I only found/staged one shot that I think counts this week, but that’s one of the reasons I like having a set for it; I can always add future shots and continue to be just as perfectionisty as I like. I did find a few in the archives that seem just about right.
Yellow was such a great color for a cold, gloomy midwinter week. And once I got into the groove of Crayola crayon yellow (as opposed to construction yellow or orange yellow) I started seeing it everywhere. (And very frequently in my photo archives, too!) The first two were taken this week; the others are older but still good.
she likes stripes 