inspiration: colour vs. pattern

What inspires you? Is it shape and design that you love? Or are you drawn to that unexpected touch of colour, that perfect palette that gets your creative cogs turning?

Of course, the things that inspire us most usually have both elements -- an interesting design in colours we love. But I've found that I often miss out on sources of inspiration, simply because I can't see past the colours used. And so, I'm trying to train my brain to accept inspiration in both forms. Here are a few examples of patterns that appeal to me in spite of their colours.



These sandwiches combinations inspire me to try mixing half-square triangles of different patterns, or even different textures. (Corduroy with cotton? Denim?)

I'd love to have a go at a solid quilt, with star sashing -- perhaps all in black and white.



This modern sampler is beautiful, but I might ordinarily skip over it simply because of my awful bias against anything that uses the colour green!



And this little town can easily be adapted to any color scheme and style (though I might keep the pink and black...)

On the other hand, for a little colour inspiration, have a look at some of the colour mosaics over at Stitched in Colour. And if you happen to like a certain Red Red collection, feel free to cast your vote!

(images sources: 1, 2, 3, 4)

{a colour-study of calm}

An advert for paint played on the telly all the time while we were in England: 

A couple, newly-married, happily painting their bedroom a bright red. They close the bedroom door, and when it opens again, a second later, several years have passed and the room is now a blur of children jumping on the bed, pets howling, and the frazzled parents, with paintbrushes and a can of white paint, frantically painting over the red walls.

Last weekend, I painted our red walls grey. I painted the beige hall grey. The week before, we painted the green kitchen grey. Over the past few months, I've been sewing grey covers for our red cushions. Slowly, slowly, our home is becoming a place of peace and refuge -- a backdrop to the colour we want to add, rather than an overflowing box of paints into which we have fallen.

A few weeks ago, I found this card in a lovely shop in Bryan. "Colour Study of Whole Heartedness," by Karen Horney. Though the colours this artist chose don't capture my sense of whole-heartedness (I don't think there's even a spot of green or purple in my heart), I love the idea of conveying an abstract value or emotion through colour.

And as I imagine calmness, displayed the same way in Pantone shades, it is so much simpler. Not thirty-six shades, small and squeezed in, but perhaps simply four swatches -- a bright white, a cloudy-summer-in-England grey, a moody charcoal, and a red that sings -- each floating in white space, free to breathe. 

{in progress: 'on the tube' baby quilt}

Sometimes, inspiration hits so hard that there's nothing to do but give in, right away, dropping everything else and running with it. 

That's how I felt when I saw this Tokyo Subway quilt by Elizabeth Hartman of Oh, Fransson!. She provides full instructions for making the quilt, including just how many thousands of squares to cut... 

 (image source: Oh, Fransson!)

...but I loved the idea of designing my own snaking, bendy train lines. I also loved the idea of scaling it all down a bit, and making a baby/toddler-sized quilt instead. Oh, and I like to imagine these are London Underground trains instead (so please 'mind the gap' between some of the blocks).

The idea was to slowly but surely cut out the 500 squares I needed over the next few months, a few each evening, leaving plenty of time to sew it together before our December due date. However, it was all just a bit too exciting, and one manic night of cutting led to four manic days of sewing, and within a week the whole top was done.

So much for slowly but surely... but then again I do have an awful habit of just making quilt tops and never backing or binding them, so at least there's a good few months left to get all that (boring) stuff done. Until then, Tilly is putting the top to good use, driving her Brio trains up and down the tracks and stopping at each 'squirrel crossing' square (made out of a pair of Justin's old boxers) to avoid any casualties.

{props}

Yes, more fun little props for Tilly's birthday photo booth. These, I printed off from Oh, Happy Day (which I wrote about here) for free. Can't get better than that.

Then, grab a few wooden dowels and a dollop of hot glue, and you've whipped them up in no time. Seriously, I made them right after I put Tilly down for a nap, and I swear they were done before she even fell asleep. 

(Note: Oh, Happy Day suggests adhering each prop to black foam. I suggest printing them directly onto cardstock and saving yourself a giant headache. If you do the foam, it'll take longer.)

I'm loving this combo -- didn't you always want to be a Cowboy Rabbit? (Yes, I knew it)

Also whipped up were a few plain white bows. We have some older children coming to the party, too, and I thought that a bit of colouring would be a nice back-up in case shape-sorters and musical turtles (and our other one-year-old appropriate toys) aren't quite as exciting as Tilly thinks.

Grab a coloured pencil, and style yourself a striped hair bow, or a polka-dotted bow tie...

The bows, I found in red as clip art online, and then simply put them in Photoshop and dyed the centres white with the paint bucket. Again, just hot glue and a dowel, and they're ready to go.



A bucket o' props, ready for some fun. Bring on Saturday! (Well, except I haven't planned what eating yet. Or made the tablecloths. So let's hold off on Saturday, actually...)

colour therapy

Days are long at the moment, and too often the temptation is to simply fall down at the end of the day and bask in inactivity and slob-dom. But when I spotted this beautiful colour theory project that Merrilee had used to make Valentine's cards from, all that red gave me a giant burst of energy.

My version was not-for-cuts, on a big-kid sized piece of watercolour paper.

I started out with a test sheet, to make sure that I could manage to draw straight lines, and liked the colours I'd picked... good job I did practice, as it ended up looking rather like a sample of Eighties' lipsticks. Orange you glad orange isn't still in fashion? 

(Note: after a brief Google search, it seems orange lipstick is slated to be the big thing for Spring 2011. Shows what I know about fashion)

Moving onto the real deal, I drew up a grid in pencil, making each square 1x1".




And then the colours started to appear.

At first I found myself over-thinking it, and imposing rules on myself: no two adjacent squares of the same colour, not more than two orange squares per row, not more pinks than reds, and on and on. 

It became rather much more enjoyable when, fifty or sixty squares in, I thought "sod that" and started to feel the colours. Well, that and I started to slop so much paint onto the brush that it tended to drip into another square before I reached the one I was going for.

Repeat after me: "Free your paintbrush, free your mind."

There really was some kind of perverse satisfaction in letting the paint ooze out of those tidy little squares, in seeing the splatter, in getting paint on our table in allowing mess.



Definitely a satisfying way to spend an evening, and even more exciting, when I woke up this morning all of the paints had dried into completely different colours -- better colours, in my opinion.

Now it's pegged up in the living room -- a reminder of the energy that colour can summon up, even on the long days.

Rambles with Red

"Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it.

I know that it has hold of me forever... Colour and I are one."

-Paul Klee

Let Your Flag Fly

"I found I could say things with colour and shapes

that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for."

-Georgia O'Keeffe

Quilt for Baby

Oh, and I found the sweetest quilt idea for the baby!

It's got the first few lines of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" around the edge, and all sorts of animals in the center. It's so colourful, and I bet baby would have lots of fun identifying the different creatures.

Of course, I didn't buy the book I found it in (the other patterns were kind of boring) so, I'll be interpreting this Astrid-style!

A Little Bit of Nothing

I'm reading a SARK book and feeling colourful.

I'm drinking my third cup of hot chocolate (today).

I went for a walk and saw a man in his front yard trying to untangle a fishing line from a tree!

I'm pulling on my pink pink felty furry slippers and putting my feet up.

These are good things.

P.S. If you don't know SARK, click here!