red, pink, and orange (color, demystified)

This is part five in my Color, Demystified series. If you'd like to read the previous installments, you can see them here:

Blue and Orange

Purple and Yellow

Red and Green

Blue and Green

Because it's been a while since we've discussed color in this way (sorry about that, I've been a titch busy with a newborn), let's recap some of the most important color rules.

1. Colors don't have to match. They have to GO. When colors go together, they enhance each other in a way that matching can't. Colors that enhance each other are inherently more interesting than colors that match each other.

2. Dynamic color choices separate the mediocre from the great. You can see it in the work of master painters, decorators, and knitters. When you're investing your precious time and hard-earned money into a project of any kind, a great finished product is always better than a mediocre one.

3. Start with a color you love and add small pops of a complementary color. Complementary colors are found opposite each other a color wheel.

4. Green is a neutral color. Nature knew what it was doing when it put green with everything. Don't try and argue, unless you want to call Mother Nature a liar.

5. No one looks better in beige. Beige can bite me.

So, today we're going to talk about an analogous color grouping. Analogous colors are next to each other on the color wheel.

When we last left the color red, it was the most energizing and motivating color of the visible spectrum -- it quickens the pulse of the viewer, and evokes strong emotions. Few people feel indifferent about red -- they are either attracted to it, or they aren't.

Pink is technically a light red, but more youthful and sweet.  Bright pinks are flirty, tropical, and sensual.

Lighter pinks evoke feelings of nostalgia, confections, and innocence.

Orange is a comeback kid. Once relegated to the vinyl covered booths of fast food restaurants, a shade of orange is Pantone's 2012 color of the year. Tangerine Tango:

Orange is zesty, joyful, fun-loving, and warm. At the terra cotta end of the spectrum, orange is earthy and associated with abundance.

Peach is inviting and modest.

And, my personal favorite, melon, is cheery and flattering without being too brazen.

When used together, red, pink, and orange have a juicy vitality that's palpable.

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So what does this mean for your home, your wardrobe, and your knitting projects?

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Here are my red, pink, and orange suggestions:

1. Use all three together when you want to look effortlessly chic and in the know. Be prepared to stand out from the crowd.

Source: chictopia.com via Yarnista on Pinterest

2. Choose one color to focus on and use the other one or two as accents. Here, a soft pink is set off with deeper reds and melon orange.

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The designer in this room started with a neutral ground, add liberal amounts of bright orange, and then sprinkled in bright pink and red.

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3. Warm hues like these look modern when combined with white.

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4. Layer hot colors with cooler ones. I love pale blue or leafy green with red, pink, and orange.

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Picnic Blanket:

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Here are some color combinations for you to try within this palette.

Cherry Ginger Ale and Watermelon Chiffon

Bountiful and Mulled Wine

Brigitta and Spoonful of Sugar

Fiona and Fondant Pink

 

Cosmo, Orange Crush, and Creamsicle

 

Are you naturally attracted to this palette, or is this a push outside your comfort zone? What questions do you still have about using these colors together? Leave me a comment, and I'll be sure to answer.

If you'd like to see more inspiration using his palette, visit the Pinterest board I created dedicated to Red, Pink, and Orange. You don't need to be a member to see it, but becoming a member is fun. If you need an invite, just use the Contact Us link in the upper right, and I'll send one over!

studio helper

I have an assistant in the studio today.

And she is very, very helpful.

She already knows how to do all of the following:

-- Dye one of a kind colorways

-- Answer emails

-- Sweep fiber from underneath the yarn winder

-- Prepare international packages

-- Ward off crazy intruders who have blood running down their leg and who want to know if "anyone here likes to play football"

-- Take coffee orders for everyone, including those among us who want soy dirty chai no foam lattes

-- Knit sweaters

-- Grin

-- Hiccup

-- Look adorable

-- Sleep

Six weeks old, and already a genius. What can I say? I know how to grow 'em.

things i'm loving right now.

These shoes.

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This revolutionary idea: you don't need a fireplace to have an awesome mantel.

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Salted Nutella fudge. Do you say Nutella, as in Nut- (like peanut) ella, or New-tella? My friend and I pronounce it differently.

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This sentiment:

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This table setting, which I'm sure will be waiting for me just past the pearly gates of heaven.

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A very simple recipe for chalkboard paint. I have so many paint samples, and I love the idea of not being confined to black chalkboard paint.

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This pumpkin decorating technique. You could use glow in the dark paint for outside, if you want to be extra awesome.

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This new colorway, coming very soon. Mad Hatter.

And this baby:

Want an invite to Pinterest? Use the contact in the upper right, and I'll be happy to send you one. (You can also email me at threeirishgirls AT gmail DOT com, or send me a direct message on Twitter -- I'm @threeirishgirls.

What things are you loving right now?

sneak peek #4: cottage garden

I've had an epiphany.

I don't have many.

A peek into my epiphanies could be disturbing, given that an epiphany is supposed to represent some kind of higher order thinking that suddenly occurs to you. What's scary is what constitutes higher order. When you're starting with a low baseline, there's a lot of room for pretty dumb epiphanies.

For example, when I started dyeing, I had one pitcher for mixing colors. I mixed up the green, put it on the yarn, then dumped out whatever was left of the green, and mixed up the pink, put it on the yarn, went back to the sink and mixed up the brown. Repeat until you cry or fall asleep, whichever comes first. It never occurred to me that I might want multiple pitchers.

Until one day when that yard-sale, 1970s amber glass pitcher broke, and I cried. Scouring ebay for an exact replacement, it occurred to me that I could get a lot of pitchers and mix up a WHOLE BUNCH OF COLORS AT ONE TIME.

Whoa.

Deep stuff there, Yarnista.

Here's my latest epiphany, humble though it may be.

I have multiple hard drives -- and a cloud drive -- chock full of pictures. The pictures live in a virtual world. A few I post here. A few I post on my website. A few I have printed and give to someone. 99.5% of them are looked at periodically and never leave my computer.

I realized that this system is shortchanging my children. My kids don't have access to my cloud drive. Yes, I can show them some pictures, but they will probably never see them again after that initial glimpse. And children love to look at pictures of themselves and of their family. I looked at our family photo albums hundreds of times growing up, and I loved seeing the scrapbooks that my mother kept during her teen years.

My sisters and I would would scootch together on the couch so we could all see at the same time and exclaim over how long our mom's hair was in 1973, or how she was always at the bottom of the cheerleading pyramid. We pored over her yearbooks, and counted the number of pictures she was in.

My kids don't have that. They don't have the tangible reminders of Christmas at age four, or of their sixth birthday, which they insisted have a spaghetti theme, because spaghetti is the best food ever.

Why? Part of it is the changed nature of photography, yes. We no longer have to pay to develop an entire roll of film, and can select the most perfect digital images before forking over the cash. Part of it is me, my own perfectionism. Why should I pay to print a so-so snapshot, when I know I can take better pictures?

Because they are my children's memories, that's why. This picture is of the six year old who just ate the pumpkin cupcakes she requested at her spaghetti party, and was thrilled to find a new bike as her gift. She zoomed up and down the alley behind our house on that July evening.

But she's never seen this picture, because it's just a snapshot, nothing special. It's got motion blur. It's got the neighbor's recycling bin. Not worth paying money to print.

Except. Except someday she will want to remember zooming up and down the alley, she'll wish she had a picture of herself on her white bike at age six. Someday when I'm gone, my children will want pictures of me, even silly ones where I'm holding a skein of yarn and making a dumb face. They'll want to see what I did for a living, and want to know why I'm wearing a lanyard and am surrounded by piles of yarn.

The six year old will want a far away picture of her ballet recital.

They'll want to know what Easter was like in Northern Minnesota (Brown, apparently. But with colorful eggs).

So I'm going to have these snapshots printed and put them into albums so my children can sit close to each other and remember. Even if the pictures are mediocre, the memories aren't.

I'm not going to spend time editing all the pictures, I'm not going to Photoshop out the stray hairs and color correct and sharpen and crop them. There are too many images, and I would soon spiral down into the place I just emerged from -- that place of perfectionism that keeps me from doing something if I can't do it really, really well.

I will choose which pictures to print -- quickly. If there are multiples of the same shot, I'll pick one. If it's a well and truly useless closeup of a dog's tongue, I'm not going to pay to have it printed and shipped. But starting now, I'm going to stop holding my children's memories hostage on my hard drive and put them on paper, where they can be enjoyed.

And this goes for everyone, regardless of whether you have no children or nineteen children: someday people are going to wish they had more pictures of you. Let someone take a picture of you once in a while. When you're gone, no one is going to care about your dirty hair or your double chin, they'll just see you at a holiday table, and wish they could be with you again.

So there's my epiphany. Worth what you paid for it.

And now on to what you're really here for: the next sneak peek of our new colorway collection. The studio is filling up with boxes, ready to ship to retailers at the appointed time. The drying lines are heavy laden, as are the packing areas, as we twist, label, and sort thousands of skeins of these beauties.

Sneak peek #4 is of Cottage Garden. It can speak for itself.

Fall Premiere Weekend is coming in September -- only a few more weeks until you'll be able to see all 34 new colorways.

Oh, and Baby Shamrock says hello. She is growing every day and is just generally beautiful and highly intelligent, even at five weeks old.

challenge accepted: five pictures

One of my good friends recently tried out her Jedi Mind Tricks on me.

"I bet you can't close your eyes and randomly choose five pictures to post on your blog, and then figure out a way to make them mean something."

Oh, good try at reverse psychology, I thought. You obviously want me to try and prove you wrong.

What she was really thinking was, "You are too much of a control freak about your photographs. You would never post something that had a stray piece of lint or your eyes closed, unless that was your intention originally."

Fine, then. I see your Jedi and raise you five random photographs, picked with a spin of the scrolling mouse wheel and a click stop.

#1:

Number one, my friend who better be reading this, is Morocco. Morocco at Walt Disney World. Disney World that I took my children to visit last November, so they could learn more about diplomacy and world studies.

Take that. Random picture number one is about INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. Ha.

#2:

Number two is a dorky picture of me, taken two years ago, in between shots for my Lookbook profile. Look, my sweater is wrinkled. There's a spot on my shirt. I look like I might stab you with my needles.

Have you seen the Lookbook? Oh, you haven't? You can click here to see my blood, sweat, and tears that was almost as painful to birth as Baby Shamrock. But even though the Lookbook is lovely, it's way less kissable than my sweet baby girl.

Random picture number two is about PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH. Very important milestones in a human's life.

#3:

Picture three is a mock up of a blog redesign that I was very unhappy with. When I saw it, my heart sank. I could not even find a place to begin articulating what would need to be changed to make it presentable. The header seemed like someone took some free floral clip art off the web and pasted them on there. The colors... no. Needless to say, I went in a different direction.

Picture three is about LOVE AND LOSS. Mainly loss. Mainly the loss of money from hiring a designer whose portfolio looks nothing like their finished work.

#4:

Well, Queen Sonja of Norway never contacted me to gush ecstatically over the commemorative colorways I made just for her. Dang it.

But I'm sure no news is good news and that she happily knit several scarves and pairs of socks with what we gave her.

Were you aware that The Yarnista is actually a blog about INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS?

Me neither. But this post makes it obvious.

#5:

This is a ferocious grizzly bear**, ready to attack my young. I must defend my offspring from the attack of the deadly grizzly. No measures are too extreme.

I have encountered the grizzly before, and know how to ward against its predatory nature.

Boom. Picture five is about POST-APOCALYPTIC WILDERNESS SURVIVAL.

**By ferocious grizzly bear, I mean mild-mannered black bear. It's funny, I can deadpan about everything in the universe, but when it comes to ferocious grizzly bears, everyone wants to email me to say they're really not grizzly bears, they're black bears. In other words, they choose this precise moment in time to begin believing that I am being serious. Why is that?

Thank you, friend, for your Jedi mind tricks. You have helped me grow as a blogger.

I now see the importance of my writings on a much larger scale -- how did I not realize I was covering important topics like international relations and wilderness survival?

You win.