Color Meme

I copied this from Kristi over at fiber fool but I actually got it from Marji .  I haven't read my way through everything yet, but I have been thinking about this color meme.  Well anything about color is always intersting, isn't it?

1. What is your current favorite color?  purples and wine reds generally, although deep true green and deep blue green run very close behind.

2. Had your favorite color changed over the years? Yes and No.  I always come back to purplish shades or greens, but I do go through phases where some color or another catches my fancy and i obsess about it continually.  Sometimes this is a color that is trendy at the time but often it is not.

3. Is your current favorite color one that is currently trendy? (Do you see it in the fashion rags or on the clothes rack or in the linen aisle right now? How about 5 years ago?) I don't think either purple or deep blue green is particularly trendy now.  The greens that have been trendy of late have been too yellow or too bright.  I am however currently somewhat fascinated by orange, which is trendy, and bright yellow.  The bright burgundies are also in it seems, and those fit into my general "purplish" purview.  They go well with orange as well.

4. What is your favorite color combination?  That is a much harder question to answer as it is much more variable.  I like deep dark browns, the color of dark chocolate with most of the cool pastels.  I love dark brown and light bright turquoise.  Fuschia and bright orange are a perenial summer favorite.  I love midnight navy with green, blue-turquoise (as opposed to the greener kind) with some purples, softer greens with gray.  I think there are too many to name, they vary with my moods and the season. 

Favorite three-color combinations are deep prune/muted leaf green/wine or wine/khaki green/and deep pansy purple, wine/khaki green/deep taupe brown are also very nice.  In fact  I can go on an on about my favorite combinations that include shades of purple, red-purple, and purple-blue, mixing them with almost every other color in some combination or another.  Favorite color combinations that are outside of this range include red/black/white  and  yellow/light or medium gray/dark gray.  Another really powerful color combination for me, perhaps a little too intense to use often is yellow/purple/black.

AT this moment I am fascinated by Medium jeans-blue/pine green/amber and white as a combination and combinatons of shadow-blue and mineral-blue with yellow and olive.

5. Is that combination a popular one? (Is it use in prints you see in the stores and catalogs and magazines now? How about 5 years ago?)  brown and turquoise is back again.  Orange and pink are popping up again as well, primarily because orange is fashionable now.  Otherwise some of my color combinations are probably popular at any given time. 

6. What is your favorite way of using color in your knitting? (Are you a stranded knitter? Do you prefer simple stripes? Do you prefer just accents at the hems/collars?)  Hmmm.  I've done stripes.  Often I just combine whole blocks of a color, like entire garments mixed with garments of other colors.  I can play with my combinations more that way.  In terms of color-knitting, I have done stranded knitting, and enjoy it, but I also like intarsia.  I tend to like an all over pattern like more than isolated spots of color, unless we are layering whole garments as mentioned above.


7. What colors look good on you? reds and greens are probably best.

8. What colors look bad on you? orange and Intense pure Blue and their attendant colors.

9. Do you wear colors that don’t look good on you just because you like them? That is really a tough question.  There are colors I can't wear near my face but can mix with colors that I can wear, as for example in the discussion of orange above.  But I don't wear most oranges or yellow-browns, or golden colors.  There is some part of me that feels I want to wear any color I love and will try to find a wear something if I love it enough, and I have occasionally fallen in love with something in every portion of the color wheel.    Generally my skin tone is cool as is my hair.  But my eyes are green and they have a lot of olive/yellow in them, and there are certain warm yellow greens that are quite attractive on me.  As I have gotten older my hair has actually gotten darker, it used to have a lighter, warmer tone, so I am heading more toward cooler colors. But I can't say that I am purely one season.  Technically I am a summer but pastels don't particularly suit me and some fall colors do.  So I find this whole color thing terribly complicated. Again my hair and skin are cool and my eyes are warmer.  Intense pure blue is almost as bad on me as intense pure orange.

10. What is your favorite neutral color? black/white/ivory/tan/brown/gray – if brown or gray do you prefer cool or warm versions of those or does it matter? And, how dark?  Deep brown, more to the cool side than the warm side.  Grays, but grays need to be more neutral or warm.  Blue grays can be difficult just as true blues can be difficult.   Increasingly black, which was too strong for me when my hair was lighter and I was younger, and is better now.  I assume that eventually the gray will gain a bigger stronghold in my hair, I will be 50 next year, I will eventually taper more toward wearing more grays, but for now I am enjoying black.

11. Is there a sweater pattern that uses more than one color that you’d like to make, but you wish to change the colors from what is published? If yes, which one? What do you not like about the published colors?  There is always at least one each season. The problem is that I usually find the chosen colorway to be strikingly beautiful and am never as happy with alternate colorways that I devise that are more suited to my particular coloring.   In colorwork patterns particularly this can be quite difficult, or perhaps it is not but I don't understand the complexities of color enough to pull it off.

This season I am fascinated by  Eunny Jang's Autumn Rose pullover.  The problem with it is that the colors are probably too autumnal for me to wear, although there are colors in the sweater that I can wear.  But I really like the published colors and a part of the reason I love the sweater is that I love the color combinations; I am just not sure I could wear it.  I think the only way I could happily adapt it is to make a large swatch in the published colors and then make swatches in my alternate colorways and live with them for a bit to see what worked for me.

The problem is that there are so many things I want to knit that I am not sure I want to devote this much energy to planning this sweater without actually getting a sweater in return.