Studying Yellow, Part 2
Yellow Around the House
Awww, Izzy. She was a pretty and sweet cat!
Like many animals we’ve known, she knew how to present herself to her best advantage. The Holstein-patterned fuzzy fabric matched her perfectly and made us wonder “Is it a cat? Is it a cow?” Meow!
The yellow margarine tub happened to be nearby, adding a pop of color to the mysterious scene.
Yellow with black traditionally means danger or caution, in natural and human environments. Think of bees and some wasps, with their yellow and black abdomen–Beware of the stinger! Think of yellow and black striped road signs that alert drivers to bridges or odd intersections–Watch out!
I think that tiny bit of white lifts the yellow-black combination from the caution zone into a happy place.
When I saw Lion Brand’s black and white FunFetti (now discontinued), I didn’t even make a study swatch. I combined it with yellow Wool-Ease to make this scarf. It was my first yellow triumph, thanks to Izzy the cat.
We had wildflowers around the house: Texas Bluebonnets, which you probably recognize as lupines; Winecups, which look like brilliant Easter eggs hiding in the grass; and profusely yellow Engleman’s Daisies. They form one of our spring’s most delicious color combinations.
The bouquet inspired me. I wanted to knit the blue, magenta, and yellow.
But wait! Let’s go back to the basic steps in Studying Yellow, Part 1, and answer the questions:
What other colors are near the study color (yellow)?
In the garden, I saw blue and magenta near the yellows, but also green.
Are the nearby colors lighter, darker, or similar in tone to your color?
The magenta is darker than the yellow, but they seem to have the same saturation. They’re brilliant. The blue and greens seem paler and recede from the brilliance of the yellow.
Do you see shadows or highlights that enhance the study color?
There are some shadows in the greenery, but to me they don’t enhance the yellow.
What are the proportions of the various colors?
In the bouquet, the proportions of yellow, magenta, blue, and green are roughly the same.
For my swatch, I went for randomly colored intarsia squares. I love this sample!
Really, it’s one of my favorite samples and I have wanted to expand this idea into a project for a while—like over a decade. But what would I make?
Within the past year, I think I have settled on a project.
Poet Sandi Horton has written several pieces for my Celebrate Doilies exhibit. She sent me a few as inspiration for a wall hanging. Her poem “Texas Hillside” describes these flowers almost exactly, and someday I’ll make a randomly-colored intarsia check wall hanging about it.
Studying Yellow, Part 3
Consulting the Experts
Maybe we don’t think about it every day, but we are surrounded by the work of color experts. Fashion, food, craft magazines, advertisements, variegated yarns, and print fabrics are created for maximum appeal. Creators want you to buy them, so they make them beautiful.
We can borrow their color expertise!
For my study of yellow, I gathered magazines that were destined for the recycling bin. When I saw attractive photos and ads with yellow in them, I tore them out.
I ended up with a lot of pages that featured yellow, turquoise, and blue. That summery combination reminds me of swimming pools and sunny beaches with turquoise waters.
Maybe it wasn’t strictly necessary, but it was fun to make this collage…
…and these swatches.
Intarsia cables are kind of a pain, but they look so nice…
As yarn lovers, we’re very familiar with variegated or multicolor yarns. Yarn manufacturers consult experts, predict fashions, and they pick the colors they think will appeal to the most consumers. The same goes for fabric manufacturers.
Go ahead—borrow their expertise!
Lion Brand’s Lion Ribbon (probably discontinued now) combines yellow with vibrant pink and blue. Small amounts of green, orange, and violet appear between the major colors. I tried to use similar proportions of solid colors in my knitted sample.
The pattern is Barbara Walker’s “String of Pearls,” most likely from her Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.
Next time: “A Suffusion of Yellow” (Thank you, Douglas Adams.)
Studying Yellow, Part 4
A Suffusion of Yellow
This is the last of four installments of my article about how to study a color with the goal of using it in your craft. I’m using the color yellow as an example for following the method. You can use the same method with any color.
Do you remember when lateral thinking was a new concept? Was it in the 1980s? Okay, well, you may not remember, so please take my word for it that self-help and business success writers wanted us to break away from linear or logical thinking, which sometimes involves being in a rut. Instead of tackling a problem or project in a linear way, they wanted us to take unorthodox approaches to problem-solving.
“Lateral” means moving to the side, or being on a side, or going from side to side. That makes sense in terms of lateral thinking, because you’re seeking solutions off the beaten path.
But the “lateral” part of lateral thinking bothers me, because it implies that your thinking is constrained to one plane. Think of high school geometry. That’s the kind of plane I’m talking about.
For the 21st century, I propose a new dimension in problem-solving. Maybe we’ll call it starburst thinking. You begin with a project or problem at the center, and you reach out for ideas in all directions: side to side, up, down, all around, into the past, into the future.
Or maybe global thinking? Nope, too small. Universal thinking?
It’s not just thinking outside the box, but thinking and researching and paying attention all around the box, inside and out, for a long, long way. Granted, a lot of the time, you won’t find anything in the vast territories you cover. However, eventually you’ll run across a clue, an inspiration, a signpost that will lead you to the idea or solution you need. It may take you a while.
Here are some of the things I did when indulging in starburst thinking about the color yellow:
- Made a list of words associated with “yellow.” Roget’s Thesaurus was the best reference book for this.
- Looked up “yellow’ in the dictionary to find alternate meanings and interesting nuances, like how yellow is associated with cowardice.
- Found other ways “yellow” used, that actually had nothing to do with yellow, like “yellow journalism.”
- Found examples of yellow in nature and decorative art.
- Collected relevant quotes from whatever I was reading or hearing, that pertained to yellow.
Let’s start with the thesaurus, which had a long list of yellow colors and pigments:
Dutch pink
English pink
Italian pink
Acid yellow
Amber
Apricot
Barium yellow
Brilliant sulpho
Butter
Cadmium yellow
California green
Flax
Mikado yellow
Milling yellow
Olivesheen
Orpiment
Yellowness:
Flaxen
Ocherous
Ochery
Gild
Aurify
Aureateness
Lutescent
That brings us to “a suffusion of yellow.”
Douglas Adams wrote The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Dirk Gently, the main character and a self-proclaimed holistic detective, buys an I-Ching calculator. When he calculates anything where the answer is greater than 4, the calculator displays the phrase: “a suffusion of yellow.”
What an interesting idea. A saturation of yellow. A pouring over of yellow. I saturated my mind with words and images that had to do with yellow, and went from there.
Now it’s your turn.
Gaudí Gaillardia
Gaudí Gaillardia (2015) is my Texas-style interpretation of a stained glass window in Parc Güell, by Barcelona’s famous architect, Antoni Gaudí. A common and lovely wildflower of Texas, the Firewheel, aka Gaillardia, replaced Gaudí’s original stained glass design. A grill of weaver’s needles, joined in a pattern of triangles, protected Gaudí’s window. I crocheted the grill for the wall hanging, and added buttons and a knitted triangle pattern to invoke the fabulous mosaics that Gaudí is so well-known for.
Making Gaudí Gaillardia
The color scheme for Gaudí Gaillardia was fairly straightforward, so I marked the color areas on a full-sized sketch, and labeled each piece. For instance, the yellow parts of the flower petals were labeled “Y1,” Y2,” and so on. Similar for the other colors. Before cutting the sketch apart, I made sure to take a photo of it, to help me put the pieces back together.
The next step can be stressfully interesting, because I roughly guess-timate how much of each color to knit, and sometimes my guess can be too close for comfort. This time everything went well. I arranged and pinned the cut-out, numbered pieces on the proper color of knitted fabric, with room to spare.
Once they were cut out, I put the pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle, using the photo for a guide. I removed the paper, little by little, and pinned the knitted pieces to a foundation fabric.
When you look at a Firewheels along a roadside, quite a few of the flowers seem to be missing a petal. That’s just how they grow. I think of them as snaggle-toothed flowers, and I’m telling you this in case you were thinking, “Why is there a big wedge of purple, where the petal should be?”
After sewing pieces to the foundation fabric, embellishing to make the flower look more like stained glass, stitching layers together, and binding, I had this bright, beautiful flower.
Sometimes you get to a point in a project, where it looks really good, and you think if you keep going, you might mess it up. That’s how I felt about adding the gray crocheted grill, which was meant to look like Gaudí’s weaver’s needles.
More reasonable thoughts took over. If I didn’t like the crocheted grill, I could always pick out the stitches and take it off. Hand-sewing the grill onto the surface of the wall hanging took a while, and when it was done, I was pleased with the effect.
Gaudí Gaillardia will soon be available for sale under the TextileFusion Market tab (see menu above).
The Fateful Hat
My mom taught me to knit when I was seven years old. I loved it immediately.
Sometime later, she got out a crochet hook and some yarn, to teach me how to crochet. I was not interested.
The early 1970s rolled around, and Mom picked up a Woman’s Day magazine at the grocery store, as she often did. And there was this hat. This yellow and orange, floppy brimmed, granny square hat.
“Mom, I want to make this,” I said.
You wouldn’t believe it now, but in the early ’70s, Austin, Texas, had a limited selection of yarns. You could find worsted weight Sayelle at the supermarket and K-Mart. By some miracle, we found the yarn the pattern called for, Aunt Lydia’s Rug Yarn, in orange and yellow. Maybe it was at K-Mart or TG&Y. I don’t remember.
Mom showed me how to crochet, and I made the hat.
So why does this come up now?
The Center for Knit and Crochet is running a fundraiser this month of May, which someone has declared “Mystery Month.” When you order a mystery magazine, CKC will send you a 1940s to 1980s knitting or crochet magazine. You can specify knitting, crochet, baby items, or homeware items, and CKC will do their best to honor your choice. Other than that, you won’t know what you’re getting until you open the envelope. That’s the mystery!
I specified “crochet.” A few days later, this 1973 Granny Squares issue of Woman’s Day arrived in the mail. You can probably see where this is going.
The magazine opened into my past, revealing a pink vest I remember wanting to make (never did).
I flipped a few more pages, and there it was. The orange and yellow granny square hat that lured me into learning how to crochet. Thank you, Hat! Thank you, hat designer Susan Fairfield! You changed my life!
Graceful Yellow
Graceful yellow flowers grow in front of a crocheted table mat, their brilliant color contrasting with the pale green fabrics of the quilt top. The flowers and the pretty filet crochet mat remind me of a time when more people took time to beautify their homes with handmade things and flowers fresh from the garden.
In Alice Walker’s book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she writes about her mother, capturing the feeling perfectly:
Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms—sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena…and on and on.
The Story of Graceful Yellow
Normally I make flowers for a wall hanging, and true to habit, I crocheted a few yellow flowers for another project. They didn’t work out for that piece, so Graceful Yellow is the other way around: a wall hanging made for the flowers.
The crocheted table mat serving as a backdrop to the flowers has picot stitches around the edges. Picots are the decorative bumps or points. Picots are notorious for curling if you don’t sew them on just right. My favorite way to get picots to stay in their proper shape, is to sew each one down with a bead, which I did on Graceful Yellow. It also has a selection of buttons, representing the ground which the flowers are growing from, or maybe pebbles on the ground.
Graceful Yellow was finished in 2017. It began touring with the Celebrate Doilies art quilt exhibit early in 2018.
Techniques used in Graceful Yellow were patchwork, quilting, crochet, appliqué, and embellishment; using cotton fabrics, threads, and binding, vintage crocheted table mat doily, beads, and buttons.
Three Stories
A fragment of patchwork, a delicate doily, and piece of filet crochet hint at three of the stories in this neatly-kept house. No matter how many floors they may have, all the homes in the places we live, have many stories.
In Mirra Bank’s book, Anonymous was a Woman, she quotes Margaret Ickis’ great-grandmother:
My whole life is in that quilt. All my joys and all my sorrows are stitched into those little pieces. I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me.
What joys and sorrows are stitched into this quilt?
The Making of Three Stories
Starting with a vintage quilt top, mostly hand-pieced, I added the vintage crocheted house panel* in the middle. The corner decorations are one crocheted doily, cut into quarters. We don’t know, can’t know, anything about the three people who created the artifacts. We don’t know their stories, but the title of the finished piece acknowledges them.
After quilting and binding were finished, Three Stories seemed a little plain to me.
To fancy it up, I crocheted the Sweetheart Rose from my own book Crochet Bouquet, and the Twirl Center Rose and Paired Leaf Frond from Crochet Garden, and arranged them in a sort of old-fashioned looking garland. I sewed them in place, and embellished with mother-of-pearl buttons.
Three Stories has traveled with the Celebrate Doilies art, poetry, and Texas Crochet Heritage doily exhibits since 2017.
*A quick doily culture note: the crocheted house panel was probably meant to protect the back of an upholstered chair from hair oil. It’s called an antimacassar, because a popular hair product of the time was Rowland’s Macassar Oil.
Poppy, Doily, Shawl
The good thing about having several projects going at once, is that sometimes you finish a couple or three of them in rapid succession.
This week’s finishing streak began with a TextileFusion project called A Very Bright Spot in 2020. It’s based on a photo of one of the poppies Charles and Ella planted in our garden last spring. Their blooms brightened those pandemic weeks when there was no school, and we stayed home except to get groceries.
A Very Bright Spot in 2020 is knitted, pieced, quilted, and embellished with crochet, embroidery, and buttons.
As part of my on-going Doily Adventure, I’ve been trying to get a sense for how doilies have changed over the years. Recently, designers are adding more surface texture to their doilies. Here’s one by Eduard Petrushin, called Gabrielle Doily. I finished crocheting it on Thursday night. (Follow Eduard on Instagram at @duducrochet; find his patterns at ravelry.com. Still need to starch it.
Gabrielle is resting on a crocheted shawl design I will release before July of this year. It’s about time! I started working on this design in 2016. It has been put aside and picked up numerous times.
To celebrate all this closure, I started a tiny wall hanging yesterday and gathered yarn for Mandala Waistcoat, by Sara Huntington. I’ve wanted to make one of those for years.
Doily Premonition
On a Saturday in July, I went to my first Needles and Friends meeting in Comanche, Texas. For some reason, as I drove along the driveway, my macramé cord doily popped into my mind. It’s a big doily that usually hangs with the Celebrate Doilies exhibit, as an eye-catcher. “People just love big, flashy stuff like that,” I mused.
My mom had given me some old macramé cord she bought years ago. I wasn’t sure how far the cord would go, so I searched for a design where it wouldn’t matter if I ran out of cord in the middle of a round.
Also, my mom had three different weights and colors of cord, so the design had to be forgiving enough to accommodate the different thicknesses.
I found the perfect pattern in one of my books of reprinted vintage thread crochet patterns. It was a luncheon set, with coasters, placemats, and a table centerpiece. They all had the same center, which was small enough for the coaster, and the other sizes were made by repeating a sort of spiderweb-type design round.
The pattern was originally published by American Spool Company, with no designer’s name mentioned. Its name is “Peacock Tails Doily Set #7444,” and you can download the pattern free at Free Vintage Crochet.
Back to the Needles and Friends group. We meet at Tomorrow’s Keepsakes, a coffee-lunch-antique-and-gift shop on the courthouse square in Comanche. One of our members showed her recent quilts and sewing projects, which we admired very much.
When she finished, she sat down, and at that point I could see the lovely antique sofa behind her. Draped across its back was the small version of the Peacock Tails doily, crocheted in thread.
This premonition thing has been happening to me a lot lately—something pops into my mind sort of randomly and I see it or hear it later in the day. Hmm…I wonder if it would work if I start randomly thinking about things on purpose, like old friends or a book I’ve been looking for. Must try to harness this!
Expanding the Art and Community of Crochet
The Evening of Excellence at the Crochet Guild of America ChainLink conference in Portland, Oregon, last week was a celebration of the Design Competition winners, the graduates of the Master Crocheters program, and the winners of the Guild Challenge, which was to see how many sets of chemo caps each guild contributed. A set of caps included one each for a man, a woman, and a child. So cool!
After all the awards, everyone (except me) settled back for a presentation about how we might grow the crochet community by…wait for it…appealing to people who don’t crochet! I talked about how we can use family connections, art, and collaboration, to broaden the appeal and appreciation of crochet.
And now you can see the evening’s ceremonies and speech for yourself, because it was live-streamed on Facebook! I come in sometime after minute 58. Enjoy!
CGOA 2018 Presentation Notes
I’m thrilled to be giving a talk this evening at the Crochet Guild of America’s annual conference in Portland, Oregon. The presentation is called “Expanding the Art and Community of Crochet.” One of the points I emphasize is using exhibits and shows to spread the influence of crochet to people outside our usual crochet circle.
Getting a Public Crochet Project Started
When I talk about a public crochet project, I usually mean a show or exhibit. You will probably come up with lots more ideas.
To me, a show is when lots of people enter things they have made for a two- or three-day display. Think of a quilt show put on by a local quilting guild, and you’ll know what I mean. There might be different categories of entries, and you could award ribbons or a Best-of-Show award.
An exhibit is more like a collection of works that center around a theme, like my exhibit Celebrate Doilies. One person or a committee would curate an exhibit, choosing historical items, artworks, and other materials that support the theme. An exhibit is usually displayed longer than a show, and can travel to different venues.
These links are to articles about how to organize quilt shows, where lots of people enter their work. They will give you a starting point for planning a crochet show.
www.quiltinghub.com/Articles/ArticleID/325
lostquilt.com/displaying-quilts/organizing-a-quilt-show/
Talking about Your Crochet Event
If you put on a show, an exhibit, or some other crochet event, you need to let people know about it.
Talk about it early and often. If you can, start at least one year ahead of time.
This post has good ideas for publicity: threadmongers.blogspot.com/2012/08/quilt-shows-attendance-and-publicity.html
You or your group will be the best advocates for your crochet event. To communicate well, you will need:
- Good photos or samples of what your event will be about, so you can show people what it will look like.
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Accurate information about your event. Think back to the Five Ws you probably learned about in elementary school: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.
Let people know the details—WHO is putting on the show or whose work is in the show, WHAT is it about, WHEN will it be, WHERE will it be, WHY are you doing this and WHY should people be interested?
- Finally, how can people help? Maybe you want people to enter their work in a show. You may need volunteers. Think about how people can help.
Where to Talk About Your Crochet Event
Involve your crochet friends and guild, but think about who else would be interested in what you are doing. Consider giving talks to:
- Genealogy groups
- Senior Citizens groups
- Service organization meetings. The Lions Club in my town has a weekly luncheon where they have a speaker. You could be one of those speakers.
- Historical society meetings
- Art and needlework groups other than crochet
Writing about Your Crochet Event
At some point you will need to do more publicity. Preferably free. Here’s a list to get you started:
Social Media
The key to publicizing anything on social media is to post often and with pictures. See if you can come up with something flashy and eye-catching to draw attention to your project. These great, big doilies I crocheted for Celebrate Doilies got lots of likes every time I post them on Instagram or Twitter.
As early as you can, make a list of magazines, newsletters, newspapers, and websites that have event listings. Find out their deadlines and be sure to meet them.
Newspapers and Magazines
You never know when your listing will lead to further publicity through a feature story. If it’s a small town newspaper, offer to write a feature article about your event.
Try tourist and travel magazines
If you are a college graduate, your alumni magazine or newsletter may want to list an event you created.
Guest Blog Posts
Even if you have your own blog, consider writing guest blog posts to expand your audience. Read the host blogger’s guidelines carefully and follow them.
Interviews
Accept offers for interviews. If you’re anxious about speaking off the cuff, ask if you can do a written interview.
Sandi Horton’s Poem
Modern Girl
Copyright 2017 by Sandi Horton. All rights reserved.
The young girl eyes the multitude of colors
She wants to find just the right one
Should she be practical with a neutral
Or choose a bright, modern color?
Her mother and grandmother chose
Different shades of white and beige
They are so old-fashioned
The girl chooses a dazzling lime green
She wants to represent her generation
Even though most other girls don’t crochet
The girl wants to keep the chain going
Her nimble fingers tighten from the stress
Lime green thread twists around and around
The hook moves slowly, in an unsteady rhythm
Her mom says, ‘Crocheting relaxes me.’
The inexperienced girl continues to struggle
She refuses to give up
A smooth pattern finally takes shape
She finishes her first and only doily
Modern girls have better things to do
