I don't know about you but, though I don't suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder beyond craving warmth and sun, by the time we hit February my eyes are in need of colour. If it's a sunny day I get out and stare at the sky but we have had plenty of pewter skies of late so I am prescribing a nice visual dose for today, and after several weeks of reading A.S.Byatt and all those luscious descriptions I am very colour-minded right now.
I wonder if that is that happy factor element of my current ASB winter reading roll, the wealth of colour and the visual cues that trigger my imagination off on a frolic of its own perhaps... and talking of imagination how interesting to read ASB somewhere saying how much she hated the covers of her books to have photos of actual people on them, to the potential detriment of the reader's imagination....which might explain the aversion many of us have to film and TV tie-in editions.
There is a nicely romantic scene towards the end of Possession when two characters are sitting in a restaurant... he is wearing a dark peacock cashmere and wool jacket (which I'm not sure Bookhound would be seen dead in actually) whilst she is wearing an ivory silk shirt with an amethyst necklace on a 'smooth throat' and a purple skirt (none of which is me either come to think of it) but I did have a wonderful bask as I imagined that colour combination, and I am very much looking forward to reading Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay which is already feeding my mental palette nicely....
'The first challenge in writing about colours is that they don't really exist. Or rather they do exist, but only because our minds create them as an interpretation of vibrations that are happening around us...'
Currently we are on the trail of Ochre in Australia.
When in London I often try and schedule in an hour at Liberty of London in Regent Street for a tread on the Ianthe rug...
before making a beeline for the fabrics and a wander along the bolts of cloth, especially the Tana Lawns.
Designs that seem to have been around forever and are part of my visual memory leap out and remind me of projects past.
I'll bet you a whole bolt, that fabric might do this for you too...
I can be transported back years by the sight of some of these.
Then I do a quick appraisal of the latest ones.
I could actually be tempted by this, it's just begging to be made into something...
And I have really been playing far too long with Picasa Collage creating this little e quilt, but the colours are too gorgeous not to...
But I really do have enough to be going with.
Every so often I get the Liberty box out...
and have a play...
This is one of the many legacies of running a little quilt shop (The Quilt Loft) for a few years and having the Liberty account for the area. I was blessed with my own set of Liberty sample books from which to choose the fabrics we would stock.
I have already made several colourwash wallhangings a la Deirdre Amsden out of these, this one about 18" square, machine pieced and hand quilted...
And so I play some more...
...but now, some twenty years on, they are a little archive of Liberty designs and getting more precious as the years go by. So much so that I end up spreading them out like this (these are some of the Tana Lawns) thinking of a hundred projects, none of which feels quite worthy of such an incredible range of fabrics...
...and so I put them all away again.
Daft isn't it...any creative suggestions, or do I just horde them??
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