Let's Talk About Color

For those of you who have seen my Ravelry projects page, you may have come to the conclusion that I am, in fact, completely enthralled by color. In the vein of 'pics or it didn't happen', I present to you the inside of my cedar chest:

Both highly colorful and highly disorganized!

As a little girl, I wore a wide variety of colors (I'm told, though some of that may have been under maternal duress) but as I got a little older, my wardrobe became more and more monochromatic. If I'm completely honest, by the time I hit high school, one could rightly classify the contents of my closet as 'melancholy' and 'drab'. Now, this isn't to say that my clothes weren't nice-- they were! It's just that every piece I owned was, invariably, black or grey. Not even white. Black or grey. I wasn't even inherently adverse to color-- I mean, I quite liked it, I just didn't know what to do with it.

This is no longer the case, fortunately. My stocking/legwarmer/tights collection alone would have sent my high school self into melodramatic conniptions. To give you some idea of the extent of my depravity: last night I went to Target and -wonder of wonders!- the entire stock of opaque-ish tights that are normally $5 each were on clearance for $3.something each. I may have a minor weakness for both clearance items and colorful tights.

Anyway, I picked up three pairs of tights: turquoise, teal, and damask blue. I got home, pleased with my purchase and realized that I already had that exact pair of turquoise tights. Not even a different pair of turquoise tights-- the same. pair. Fortunately, I was able to pawn the still-sealed pair off onto a friend so it was not a complete waste.

The inclusion of color into my wardrobe is something I credit largely to my knitting. Before knitting, it was easy enough to always wear black and grey because, dammit, it always matched. When I started knitting, however, I had absolutely zero interest in black yarn: it was simply too hard to see the stitches, first off, and second-- have you seen a yarn store recently? It's a riot of color! It's so loud and wonderful and even though I was doing a lot of my purchasing in Michaels, there was still so much to look at! The first time I visited my first local yarn shop, I thought I might actually die of chromatic happiness.

One of my first finished objects was a pair of somewhat hideous legwarmers (I still wear and get a disproportionately huge number of compliments on them) made from Lion Brand Homespun in some muted rainbow-ish colorway. At the time, this was the first shock of color my wardrobe had seen for years.

Um, yeah, that's a toe ring.

During the successive years, I've had quite the opposite problem as before: there is, perhaps, too much color in my wardrobe. I've actually had to rein things back a little and try to put a little bit of neutrality back into my knit goods. I've actually had to knit a few grey shawls recently, just to offset the Crayola-bright look my clothes have attained of late.

Mostly, I'm okay with it. Knitting the occasional neutral-colored thing (which reminds me-- I need to make something in navy blue and/or black forthwith) is tolerable in the grand scheme of things as long as it keeps me, generally, in technicolor.