If things seem pretty quiet around here, that is because the whole team is beavering away behind the scenes in preparation for our Allover Club, which begins at the end of this month. There’s going to be an awful lot involved in this club, with different kinds of resources and information to help us to really think about colour – as well as to knit with it.
On Mondays, club members will receive a new colourwork pattern, delivered directly to their Ravelry libraries (or inboxes, for non-Rav members). Then, on Wednesdays, we’ve commissioned contributions from talented designers – all of whom are well-known for their work in colour – who will be sharing fascinating insights into their creative processes and sources of inspiration. Plus, every weekend, club members will receive an additional “colour resources” newsletter, offering surprise pattern bonuses, additional charts, tips, and tricks for working with colour when photgraphing or styling your knits. And, finally, every Friday, I’ll be posting a new essay about the colourful history of dyes and pigments, paints and palettes, shades . . . and shade cards.
Shade cards really intrigue me: I find them such wonderfully evocative objects, full of nostalgia and romance. And the intense power of the shade card, it seems to me, is often as much about the naming of colour, as it is about colour itself.
I’m currently working on an essay on the evocative nomenclature of colour – and I need your help! Whether it’s paints or threads, yarns or crayons – do you have a particular favourite shade name? What does the shade name mean to you? Is the name of the shade associated with a particular childhood memory, with the walls of a house in which you previously lived? Is it a name that makes you laugh because it seems so ridiculous? Do shade names stick in your mind because they seem so apposite – so like what they describe – or is it, in fact, the opposite: that the names of shades seem memorable because they really don’t resemble what they purport to represent?
So please help me out, and tell me about your favourite shade names in the comments on this post below. I am very interested to hear what you have to say, and hope to incorporate some of your remarks into the essay that I’m writing for the Allover Club.
If you’d like to immerse yourself colour in the Allover Club, sign-ups close this Sunday (23rd). Join us!
KDD & Co 
One of my favourite examples of colour naming comes from a small producer in Ontario, Canada: Indigo Dragonfly yarns. I first encountered their yarns at a KnitCity event in Vancouver, BC and was charmed, amused and ultimately enchanted by the names they had chosen for their yarn colours, names such as: ‘Not all Mathletes are Created Equilaterally’, ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ (limited edition), Do No Pass Dingo, Do Not Collect 200 Babies (Cariboubaa) (Special Edition). The list goes on as do the chuckles. Their approach to colour naming is well worth an afternoon lost down the rabbit hole.
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Color is the most elusive thing about knitting. We hold these projects and look at them for weeks if not months. I might love holding and looking at a certain color palette, but look like an Easter egg wearing it, so it is never worn. Conversely making a smashing looking garment (for me) would involve holding and looking at something rather boring for months. Egh. I’ve decided I have an Autumn/Winter personality. I am like Dorothea in “Middlemarch,” preferring to let my inner light shine and not be sidetracked by drapery; not the effusive Rosamond who is a walking ornament from head to toe. Every one has a color personality and that should be the first element of knitting for the body. This does not mean I dress like a nun, but that my colors are tuned not to outshine me.
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I find women have code names for color that really have little to do with the actual name. What we understand as “avocado” is neither the outside nor the inside of an actual avocado; the same for lime green. However, when mentioned neither of those fruit colors are evoked.
The essay about Chevreul was very interesting, but I don’t see where his theories have been applied to the projects. If short projects are good, I’d rather make swatches employing some theory of color – this is supposed to be about color. I signed up to learn about color, not just another KAL for small projects, thus far, disappointing. The demo by Terri Laura was interesting too.
I’ve tried something like that by wrapping yarn around, but nothing really predicts how the knitting will look EXCEPT KNITTING IT.
Kate has a style of color and knitting that suits her very well. She’s a small woman who looks well in negative ease and her vibrant spritely colors look great on her, especially against the Scottish landscape. None of that suits me. Again, I draw back to the idea I should find someone whose colors I admire and want to emulate and see if I can uncover her color theory and what makes it tick.
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The memory I want to share talks about the power of names and naming things : When I was about 5 years old, I wanted to tell something about a red-haired boy I recently met without knowing his name. I described him to my mother as “the boy with the golden hair” – and was completely puzzled by her reaction. She stared at me with astonishment, then she laughed out loud, gave me a big hug and repeated with a sort of fairytale telling voice “The boy with the golden hair”. Later, I understood that she herself grew up with these dumb prejudices connecting a person’s outer appearance with a set of characters. And that she was proud of me inventing another name avoiding to call red hair as red hair. Still today I can recall my irritation about her reaction : For me red hair meaned something like the red synthetic wool hair of a clown puppet or Pumuckl – and that didn’t describe the boy’s hair at all. Besides, I must have had our visits to museums in mind, and my father’s enthusiasm about ancient roman founds as well as his explanations on the various colours of gold. (Just read, that there are 9 colours of gold depending on its alloy.) Luckily, two of my boys are golden haired, too. Not the red hair, I admired most, and which I saw only once on a school mate : a very very dark coppery shining red I can’t describe, possibly called chestnut, but that doesn’t get the point. And which is not at all the fox-like red of my airedale terrier whose colours the standard of his breed describes as black and tan.
Tan, a word that for me as a non native English speaking person, doesn’t evoke any connotation at all.
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thank you, Corinna, for sharing this. I love your account of the boy with the golden hair!
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Following along from Helen’s childhood experience with medicine. She reminded me of the clear dark blue bottle which contained warmed drops for an earache meant relief.
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I had a very definite color in mind as I read your article and thought, “I should tell her.” Then I thought, “Oh, don’t be full of yourself.” Then you threw down the ‘challenge/request’ for our thoughts, so…here it is.
I HATE (yes a terrible word) a particular yellow/green color. I love almost every other color under the sun and will use them all freely but that one color and I am very aware of why. When I was about 2 (back in the dark ages) I had to have a particular medicine. This was in the days before doctors got the idea of actually making the medicine palatable to young children. It came in a glass bottle (I told you it was a long time ago) and had to be kept refrigerated. I think my mother had to literally pin me to the floor to get any in me. It was a sickly yellow/green and I still cannot abide that color. So there is the association with a horrid flavor and traumatic time in a young child’s life. :)
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Such a thought provoking article and one full of deep meaning. You actually brought back the magic of opening that new box of crayons – the smell, the color, the feel, the excitement, the endless possibilities of creation. All of that plus learning a word new to me – vexillology. Thanks !
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Have enjoyed reading the thread. Love colour whether paint colour samplers or yarn shade cards. The love of colour may have taken root when I too received a box of Crayola crayons with a colouring book at a young age. I don’t think I ever had 64 though. I have fond memories of setting out on summer holiday with my family and a new set of crayons and book to keep me occupied. The colour Periwinkle has always been a favourite. It tickles the tongue. I wear it and I plant it. It’s a complex blue and purple. I love the way the flower pops out amongst the dark shiny leaves in the garden.
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When I was five, I was playing with coloured pencils one evening and discovered you could layer up the colours…and get new colours! Orange and yellow together worked really well, but only if you put the right one down first (I forget which). This fact, that there was a process or ‘knack’ to it, to me, made it An Invention. I had inVENTed a NEW colour! And of course- of course!- it needed a name. I named it Golden Peachy Colour. Emphasis on the ‘Peachy’. I was SO excited, so pleased with myself.
The next day I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend, Shona, all about this. Shona replied that, actually, SHE had invented it.
I knew this was Not True- if it had happened in school and we were all working on the same task, maybe, but I’d done it last night! On my own! Shona would not listen to reason. This meant she was Lying- the one thing that, in my household, You Absolutely Do Not Do. AND she was a year older than me! I was so, so angry and upset for so many reasons, amplified by the fact no grown ups really seemed willing to validate why I felt like this. I was just a little kid, nobody ‘invents’ colours!
I’ve always hated the way adults insist on asking kids what they ‘want to be when they grow up’ so they can wring out a few cultural norms or laugh indulgently. After the first time, I always pretended I didn’t know. Apparently, you can’t want to be an artist- they are all men who died hundreds of years ago, and get you! Think you’re so good at drawing! Well. Now I’m 45 and I AM one, so ner!
In my first year at art school I was so lost, I didn’t know how to get started and I nearly got kicked out for never being in the studio. Right at the bottom of the J-curve, I got out my coloured pencils and made Golden Peachy Colour.
It’s a great colour :-)
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hurrah for golden peachy colour, and for all the great women artists
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I have to say that as an artist, colour is everything. Certain colours literally make my mouth water. One of my most mouth watering colours is Southern Ocean Blue – a rich deep phathlo turquoise that was made to represent us here down under in New Zealand. I also had marvelous fun mixing up my own book of colours and naming them, it was such an interesting and exciting process and a little trickier than I thought, but lovely names like “between the devil and the deep blue sea”. It is fascinating because some of our Southern Hemisphere colours are definitely different to the North – if you feel like looking Matisse do a range of paints for the south – hence Southern Ocean Blue and have a look at Australian Raw Sienna – very different to raw sienna that is traditionally used, but very delicious!
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Peta
For as long as I can recall I have had a fascination & love for colour & it’s many nuances. It has an intriguing way of evoking emotion & memories, & through The Allover Club’s fantastic & informative essays, the blogs & the amazing projects, my appreciation of it has deepened. Throughout childhood, my family lived in the country & holidayed by the seaside. Landscape colours were widely varied. Beautiful gardens were a feature & were all the more special for their infinite colours & fragrances. Like many of you who fondly remember colourful boxes of crayons, & Faber Castell colouring pencils, I have fond memories of tins, or boxes, of Derwent colouring pencils found in my sister’s & my Christmas stockings every year. What a joy & a privilege it is to be part of this wonderful Club, & a big thank you to you, Kate, & your team, for taking us all on this amazing journey.
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Honey Ginger….was my first grown up lip stick…a beautiful soft Coral!
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Coccinelle must be my favourite colour name. I don’t know if it’s used in English colour names, it means ladybug and for me, it evocates summer, when I was a child, dressed in nothing more than a dress or short and those ladybugs were crawling on my hand. Mostly it’s the name for a dark red, but like often with reds it can also come as a surprise
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“It’s so interesting that so many of us were fascinated by the big box of Crayola crayons as children.”
I too adored my big Crayola box. I was also given a set of coloured pencils in grade 2. I loved and cared for them, intrigued by the drawing on the cardboard in the front.
50 years later I had a little money and decided to buy some proper colouring pencils to do decoupage. I looked at several brands but ended up buying the full set of Faber-Castell polychromos. Some time later I came across that little plastic pouch of my primary school pencils. Yep, you guessed it, they were made by Faber-Castell!
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I’ve been blessed to come from a long line of talented and artistic ancestors, and as such, have had a life immersed in color, be it woodcrafts with deep rich stained finishes, to almost every fibre and fabric discipline you can imagine.
I love looking at a palettes and thinking about how the colors will merge and play off each other.
From subtle pastels to rich deep jewel tones, or a fusion of contrasts, I love the potential each combination brings.
I’ve had a number of favourites over the years, but my current obsessions are Mango and Aztec Gold, colorways from the minds of Troy Martin and Simone Van Iderstine @ Belfast Mini Mills in PEI, Canada.
The rich bright warm yellow of Mango needs to be seen in person to be appreciated and brings to mind warm sunny days filled with joy, and is a perfect representation of the sweet exotic fruit for which it’s named.
In contrast, the deep tonal Aztec Gold speaks to darker times and brings to mind the shadows and light reflected off golden artifacts lit by firelight.
Much yarn in both of these colors currently live in my stash and have yet to be committed to a project worthy of their wonderfulness 🤗.
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Rangwali (F&B) caught my imagination and made me think of ‘17 Kings and 42 Elephants’, a book we read to our 2 sons so often that we knew the words by heart. We decided to be brave and use this intense colour on our conservatory walls – the light plays on the walls and it makes us fell hugged!
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When I was little (5 or 6 many decades ago) I wanted my bedroom painted conker a colour on the dulux chart. It was a gloss paint in a rather dark and dismal brown but the name obsessed me. Thank god my mum said no but I still remember my love of the Conker name
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I love colour. As a child nothing excited me more than getting a box of coloured crayons or felt tip pens. I particularly liked Rowney colouring pencils and I found names like veridian, crimson and vermilion just added to the excitement of using the colour. To this day there is a particular shade that I call pencil green because of those crayons.
I also liked paints and I remember my mother having a watercolour box that we children were not allowed to use, names in the palette like burnt umber, sienna, cobalt and ochre seemed very exotic and literally out of reach.
Finally I remember the doors to our house being painted Trafalgar blue and helping my Dad chosose the colour . I loved to study the shade charts, I still do, and I find the names as intriguing as the colours themselves.
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Mal de mer (sea sick) – It was a green color that was sold by Montgomery Ward Department Store’s paint department in the 1970s. It was their own brand of paint. I remember laughing when I saw the name thinking this was going to be my favorite paint color name ever! If I remember correctly, the color wasn’t that awful. I just wonder how it even got approved and how much fun that meeting was when they came up with the name. They must have been a bit loopy and feeling silly as well as potentially tired of coming up with new names for hundreds of colors. lol
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wonderful!
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In my first real home of my own, I painted several rooms in the color “creme fraiche” which was a subtle buttery beige color. I found those rooms to be so soothing yet also very cheery. My first adult understanding of how much color can influence our sense of well being and mood. Several homes later, I still miss those sunny walls.
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Hello, thank you for this wonderful conversation.
I remember leafing through wool catalogues my mother received when I was a child, occasionally stroking the samples but mostly looking at the shade names. The shade name I remember best, however, has nothing to do with wool. As a teenager I wrote with a fountain pen and came across ink cartridges called “bleu des mers du Sud” (Southern seas blue) and decided I would write in this turquoise shade instead of the usual dark blue ink.
Colour names, as many have pointed out, can be misleading. Asked to write a poem in primary school, I used the adjective “vermeille” to describe the moon; to me it sounded like “merveille” (wonder) and I thought it was a very light green, a bit like fluorescent toys, but with hints of blue. In fact it is a variant of “vermillon” (vermilion) so I was quitte puzzled when my teacher asked why I wanted the moon to be… red!
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I’ve successfully named two yarns in colour naming competitions by indie dyers on social media. Both times were cases where I didn’t think or try to be clever – I just named the the first thing that came to mind. One was Fire Opal by Madelinetosh in summer 2021 – a yarn with so many colours blended in that it’s hard to describe. The other was Summer Sunset earlier this year by Knitting Lizard Fibes — a rich orange/pink. Maybe I’ll find patterns for my skeins as part of this club 😊
As a child, colours that come to mind are Cerulean Blue, my favourite in the crayon box. The name sounded faraway and important and the shade is the perfect, bright rich mid-blue.
Then at around 9/10 years old I went through a horrific phase with like green as my favourite colour. I had a spectacular like green chenille sweater which I paired with a long black velvet skirt — quite the combo.
Then as a preteen, after my bedroom had gone through a bright pink era, I decided it was time to tone it down and chose taupe. Why taupe? I have no idea. It felt more sophisticated than beige and had just enough richness to not feel boring. A stark contrast to the pink with stencilled daisies that were there before!
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I love both the colour and name of Inchyra Blue. We used that colour a lot in our last, lovely hone, and it reminds me of the decades of joy and comfort we had there.
Now – in my new home – I look out over water and sky, the blues are ever-changing. It’s a magical colour!
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When I was a kid, I was really intrigued by the classic pigment names like viridian and alizarin crimson – they sounded like words out of a magic spell.
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Eau de Nils – such an evocative name and such a gorgeous but subtle colour.
It seems wonderful that the exotic name is so perfect for a shade that may be passed by by some, but has real depth and character; as a child it had the ability to transport me to a place of wonder of other parts of the world by virtue of its name.
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Azure and midnight are my favorite color names because of their mystical and poetic uses, such as in Shakespeare sonnets. But “amarillo”, Spanish for yellow is my favorite-sounding color word.
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Such an interesting thread and the Club has not even started yet! Also not exactly an answer to your question, but I am intrigued by how at the same colour is named differently in different languages. My nephews live in Germany, and speak both German and Dutch. When they choose the colour(s) for their new jumpers, they come up with brilliant new ‘Dutch’ colour names based on the German colour name. This leads to very interesting conversations even though the languages are related. The English ‘teal’ is “türkisch” in German and “turquoise” in Dutch. (ok, both words refer to more or less the same ‘root’, but most people will not be aware or that). My nephew wrote that this year he would like a “Turkish jumper” – something no Dutch speaker will understand.
PS As a non-native English speaker, I often enjoy these ‘evocative, inventive’ colour names; but relatively often -with the name only and no shade card- I would have no idea what colour ‘field’ is referred to.
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Oh thank you kdd. I rediscovered colourmakespeoplehappy.com. Now which shade for the spare room ceiling? CL05 Let’s Not Speak of this Again? CL13 Withering Scorn? Or the brilliant sky of VA04, The Room was Dull and Depressingly Basic with a 20 Watt Lightbulb in it?
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Dreich
A fabulous Scottish word meaning dreary and bleak, usually appertaining to the weather. I live in Lancashire, and this is a word that often comes to mind when I open the curtains on another grey, damp and dreary day.
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I chose “malted milk” paint for my dining room, a neutral to offset my bright curtains and posters. The young painters were heard saying, “this in the color of my GI Joe from when I was a kid” – and it is.
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When I bought my latest car, in standard edition I had a choice of 8 colours, 5 of which were grey. They had the most interesting names: amazon grey, aurora grey, sleek silver, dark knight and baby elefant. – I can still remember “baby elefant”, the other colours I had to look in the leaflet.
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I’m a quilter and love working with color. There’s always something more to learn!
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When we were little kids, we loved the Magenta crayon but the name of the color seemed complicated and elusive for some reason so we all called it “favorite pink.” To this day, I think “favorite pink” when I see the color!
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What a wonderful thread! It’s making me muse on all the beautifully evocative shade names that people are describing so poetically. I have two that make me smile. My uncle once had a car that was officially ‘Colorado Beige’. It was unmistakably orange and has been a joke between us for many years. And magenta amuses me because my husband confuses it with magnolia…
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Not a shade name but in Welsh the word ‘glaswellt’ means ‘grass’. The literal translation is blue-hay – a good example of different meanings using the same word or how a word once covered a wider range of colours than just “blue” as it is interpreted today.
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wonderful!
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. . which reminds me, in Scottish Gaelic, “gorm” can mean green / grassy / verdant AND blue – in the same ‘fresh, young’ sense as your “glaswellt”
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Ha-ha! In Yorkshire where I’m from ‘gormless’ means to have no sense, to be stupid!
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My daughter and son-in-law painted their entire main floor. they were determined not to be ‘boring’. So the walls are all Jamaican Teal, either a dark version or a lighter one. When they were done, they looked around and stated, “We are living in a swimming pool!”
Rookie mistake, it’s a lovely colour, just not on EVERY wall!
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When I was in elementary school (late 1950s- early 1960s, U.S.) we were sorted into groups according to where we lived and each group given a color name. We were told this was for emergencies only, so we could look for a sign with our color and find the other children who were neighbors. My color was “Robin’s Egg Blue” I loved it so much that the whole idea was very comforting and reassuring. I was probably in kindergarten or first grade and had no idea of what kind of emergency the adults were talking about. I still love the color.
Also the crayon color names, especially magenta because I loved the color. I protected that crayon and barely used it so I could have it to look at.
I once was at a trunk show at my LYS for a local designer and wanted to support both the artist & the store. I couldn’t find anything I really liked until I noticed a braid of dyed roving called “Camping Barbie” so that’s what I bought, because of the name! It was pink and lots of woodsy browns & greens. I spun it into a good knitting yarn and made mitts for my daughter. She played with Barbies for a while as a kid and became an outdoors loving adult, so she loved the color name as well.
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I find the color “Robin’s Egg Blue” very comforting as well!
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Sky Blue Crayon
When I was born, I was put in the same crib with my best friend Susan. That was 63 years ago. To this day, we still talk about the sky blue crayon in the box that we, as children, fought over, gave to each other as a special present, and drew our childhood pictures with for many of our young years. To this day, it will bring a smile to our faces with a giggle every time we talk about the sky blue crayon in the box!
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I love shade cards too, and the naming of colours. Really enjoying reading these comments. Like others, I’ve always adored Prussian Blue, for its suggestion of the faraway north German exotic. My grandparents were German and my grandfather was manager of a Faber Castell pencil factory in Ireland from the 1950s to 1970s. As a child, therefore, in the 1980s, I had the most wonderful, high quality Faber Castell colouring pencils, in all sizes of tins, from tins of 12 to the headiest collection of 84. Absolutely stunning. Their smell, their gradations of shade…
On colour names, I am still disappointed that ‘azure’ is not pronounced ‘az-YOOR’, as I thought it was when I was a child, but rather ‘EY-zher’. I thought the long ‘YOOR’ syllable really evoked the wonder of the colour. It’s related in my mind to ‘lapiz lazuli’, which I also mispronounced as ‘lapis lazOOLi’ – I associate them of course because of the blue and the ‘az’.
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I also love nail polish color names, in particular the brand OPI. My girls and I had quite a collection and used to say what fun it would be to have the job of naming the new colors. For years my favorites were Confucius says “Coral”, and Bogota Blackberry, but I loved the names I Don’t Do Dishes, and I’m not Really a Waitress.
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My, friend who worked in the garment industry in NYC would come home with samples of colors and the assignment to come up with names for them. What incredible fun! I love how OPI names their colors. It gives each color a story!
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At one point, I was an editor and typesetter. Two women in my department were debating the color of someone’s shirt– was it pink or red? They wanted me to cast the deciding vote.
Rather than take sides, I glanced at it, then quickly answered (with unquestionable confidence), “It’s Pantone 106-C.” And I quickly walked away.
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What a great idea. Sounds a bit like my Dad’s technique when asked a question – say it confidently.
Of course, being just over 6′ 4″ gave his replies added authority.
He got away with some real leg-pulls!
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Many years ago, on an episode of “The Love Boat,” some painters used a color name I never forgot: “Singapore Sunset Safron.”
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When I was about 7 or 8 (1972/3) my mum asked my dad to paint the outside of our house in a shade called China Blue. I imagined what our house would look like when it was painted, would it transform our sunshine semi in Salford into a glamorous House from China? It did not ! Mum hated it when it was done but dad refused, after using a week of his annual leave to get it painted, to redo it for at least 5 years. It always makes me smile when I think of that tale but I do love the colour China blue, just not for my house.
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When my grandson was about 4 ,we walked into a store that was displaying an old dark green truck. Oh look he exclaimed excitedly “a navy green truck” . My youngest daughter at 3 when asked her favorite color , would always answer magenta. Both children have grown up to have careers in the arts. Thank you Kate for a wonderful morning spent down this “rabbit hole” Margaret
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I have been reading all the comments since I first answered this question earlier.
And I have been thinking on colour all the time.
To me the word “Kobaltblau” (cobalt blue) brings up memories of fine bone china with blue decor like Meissen and Zwiebelmuster – and of an old lady. My mother owned a cobalt blue vase, which I adored. It was given to her by a motherly friend, a true lady, who would always (always!) wear gloves, lacy ones when indoors. I have never seen the skin of her hands. And she used a lorgnon instead of glasses. In my childhood she was one of the rare elderly persons we children loved to visit. She was a character and good with children.
The word “Preußischblau” (Prussian blue) reminds me of Frederick the Great and his Guards, and makes me feel the Prussion discipline an austerity, while the English word for the same colour makes me feel the other side of Prussian values like freedom of religion, modesty, love for the arts etc..
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Years ago I lived in Tokyo in a traditional home that had been converted into small apartments. My apartment would have been a very traditional formal room with shoji sliding doors, tatami floor and view over the back garden. It’s walls were painted a deep green that I thought of as the colour of matcha tea, but Western friends called “pigeon shit” green. It was the most relaxing and gentle colour and I loved the immediate feel of being cocooned in a safe and warm place when I was in that room. The colour was somewhere between “uguisucha” – nightingale brown, and “kokeiro” – moss.
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When we had the cedar shakes on the outside of our Arts and Crafts-style house restored I chose a dark olive brown/green opaque stain for them. They were revealed to be light blue underneath the modern siding and I think the contractor thought we would just reuse that color, but I had done my homework with the original Arts and Crafts shade cards and was confident in my choice. He was sceptical of the “baby poop” brown, but went ahead with the painting. Once the exterior was finished with tan window frames and espresso brown rafter tails he admitted to me that he had thought the olive colour was a big mistake, but now seeing it all together he knew that I was right.
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MUSTARD. I’m Scottish and don’t know if that has any bearing on my favourite colour or not! Mustard is the perfect description of what the colour is (for me). And it has become my favourite colour over the years. There are many shades – I love ’em all. The word itself sounds a bit heavy and dull, but the colour is far from that. I also love Antibes Green – it’s an Annie Sloan paint colour. And Russian Red – my favourite lipstick colour. Colour – what’s not to love: truly, madly, deeply.
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Midnight. When I was six years old, the BIG box of crayola crayons had a new color called Midnight Blue that matched exactly my favorite color of the summer sky long after sunset just as stars were beginning to show. Not quite true blue, it seemed to have a warmth to it from the pinks and golds of the setting sun. After seven decades of sky watching, that moment of summer evenings continues to be a favorite and calls forth memories of “sleeping out” with my brothers in our back yard. We’d watch the stars brighten and meteors streak across the cosmos. And wonder what sort of cheese the moon was REALLY made of :)
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I love colors that cannot be described in one word. Colors that are a mix, not predictable or obvious. Blue-green, red-violet. As a painter I tend to describe a color based on what went into the mix. It amuses me no end how people come up with words to name a color that really could mean something different to everyone! What is mauve? What is puce?
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I always felt lucky that my mother (who was generally very thrifty) always splurged for the box of 64 Crayola crayons for us each year. Midnight Blue was not in the smaller boxes and was my very favorite color. I had a little friend in 2nd grade, a boy, but I don’t remember his name. We both loved and protected the Midnight Blue crayon in my box and we called it “Mr. Midnight.” Great memories. I’m knitting a sweater right now with a deep navy blue yarn that has added depths because the base yarn is gray. Reminds me of that gorgeous crayon.
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Lovat green means a lot to me. It is a beautiful shade and when I was younger a favourite of my dad. Its not a colour that I hear mentioned very often and I was delighted when I discovered Jamieson’s blue lovat. I bought some immediately and made a lovely short sleeved top.
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Ashes of Roses.
Caput Mortuum.
And the Burnt and the Raw, siena and umber.
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The first (& maybe only) yarn that I ever bought purely on the shade name carried the title of one of my favorite songs; off my favorite album- Prove It All Night. It was a shade of Blue Moon Fiber Arts “Socks That Rock” I made my first fingerless gloves with its mixed, rich reds & burgundies.
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I live in the mountains of western Montana and the paint color name of the dark green trim on the house is Briny Deep.
Odd name for a land locked region.
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I love a lot of the colour names from Brooklyn Tweed, especially Postcard. It speaks of times past, nostalgia, memories, the wonder of getting a post card in the mail and the excitement of looking at its picture and imagining myself there. I bought this yarn based on its name. So it’s effective branding too!
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The colour name that is most memorable for me is a car colour shade from the 70s, perhaps for a Buick, called Sea Foam Green. I love a happy aqua or turquoise colour. I imagine sea foam green to be a frothy light aqua colour. The car colour itself, that inspired the name, was more a dull metallic grey-green. Very disappointing. Good luck with your article. I’m looking forward to reading it.
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From a long ago box of Crayola crayons I have kept one crayon – Robin’s Egg Blue. And it is just that colour, should you come across an empty shell on the ground during a spring walk. Another evocative name that I love is Lapis Lazuli. The very richness of blue…
Very much looking forward to the Allover club. Thank you for creating it!
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I have particularly fond memories of Farrow & Ball’s Sugar Bag Light. Painting pine doors with this and adding new doorknobs totally transformed a kitchen. The particular circumstances associated with that time and house are also associated with the colour. Unfortunately Farrow & Ball have discontinued that particular shade.
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One of my favorite fiber tops from John Arbon is „Black Gold of the Sun“, from the Yarnadelic shaded. You can also buy this 100% corriedale fiber as spun yarn. It‘s quite dark, but with yellow/green, blues, and purple shades. The unspun top is as intriguing as the finished yarn. It’s such a vivid colour, that looks very dark at first glance, but then you discover the other colours. I’m in love with the beautiful name that makes me think of childhood days, trying to look to the sun through dark and colorful glass shards. And this memory makes me happy.
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I have a friend who was very pleased with the fact that the color they selected to paint their bathroom was called Tailwind.!
A few years ago I did a project matching yarn colors to photographs of if my trip to Nepal. I used Jamieson Spindrift because it is available in over 200 shades and spent hours poring over their shade card. One advantage of yarn is that it doesn’t have to be a uniform color. The Sky shade is a beautiful blue with subtle white undertones. Autumn is an amazing combination of green, red, yellow, and orange. At some point I ended up also getting the shade card from Jamieson & Smith in the search for even more colors. I was disappointed, though, to discover that they just number their shades. I realized that I enjoy getting a glimpse into the shade designers’ intentions. It was also a lot easier to remember shade names than numbers.
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Oooh! What color is Tailwind, in more ordinary terms?
And I agree with you, shade names, even when I think they don’t suit, are *much* better than numbers.
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Living on the coast of Maine it’s no wonder I have loved the colors BM Lighthouse Landing, Sail Cloth and Yarmouth Blue. Not only is it the names that I love but also the colors throughout my house!
When my som was little I took him to the LYS to pick out yarn for a sweater vest (sleeveless in US) . He chose a yellowish green alpaca blend, quite bright. For Kindergarten picture day he came out with a striped blue button down dress shirt, the handknit “ugly” vest, orange board shorts, tube top socks and red/grey sneakers plus a superhero bandaid. Still my favorite picture!
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I once painted my bedroom walls a gorgeous shade of green called Belladonna–I promise I did not lick them! I also painted the ceiling (it was an old house and they had previously papered it so it was turning yellowish). I’ve forgotten the name of the color I used but it was equally evocative of the deep medium blue I chose, maybe something like Pompeiian Sky? Just realizing how portentous that one also sounds. Hmmm… I don’t live in that house anymore. Wonder if the walls and ceiling have stayed the same!
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Apricot. Not only is it a gorgeous color, but I love the way it rolls off the tongue. It conjures up images of early morning toast or the smell of an ancient orchard. Nectar of the Gods…..
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When I moved into my Derbyshire farmhouse I chose a colour called borrowed light from Farrow and Ball for the dining room and kitchen. It is a glorious colour that is warm in summer sunshine and in winter has a depth that reminds me of warmth to come. It is a form of blue but so much more. Colours can wrap around you so wonderfully.
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I like to respond to your question to explain my long love affair with the F&B paint colour ‘old white’.
I’ve been using Farrow & Ball paint colours for over twenty years ever since buying my first home. I have subsequently used them in every home that I have owned.
The range of F&B colours, particularly those with their exquisitely rich chalky flat finish and poetic names are so tempting. Many of them are based on heritage and existing colours from certain periods in history uses titles such as ‘Card Room Green’, ‘French Grey’ and ‘Dead Salmon’!
Over time I have painted walls and furniture in so many different shades but always came back to the colour ’Old white’. F&B describes it a soft grey green, the most historic of all their traditional neutral whites. The colour changes with the light and time of day from a subdued green to a more classic gray. It’s a colour I never get tired off and makes me feel happy.
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I have been so inspired by all the posts here. I do not usually comment on these but felt I wanted to share. Colour has always been a huge part of my life from my Mum, an artist in her own right to my step father a unique and wonderful person who’s life represented colour. He was a painter and his work is exhibited across the world as far as I am aware. My Mum represents muted more subtle colour whereas my step father was always bright and vibrant. Rich bright colours. They really complimented each other. Me, I love colour full stop. Most colour I will make comment about even if I do think it’s ghastly. I often look at names colours are given and will/won’t choose them according to whether I like the name or not. I adore stormy grey, like the colour of the sky when a storm is approaching and how green the plants are with this changing light. Lately I have been decorating and I have chosen a deep ink blue for my hallway. However reading some of the posts I love the idea of a rich warm earthy red. Time will tell. Thank you all for a walk down memory lane with Crayola crayons. Puce to me was always a colour people went when they were so angry 😂. Can remember reading somewhere about being puce with anger. Be interesting if anyone else has this thought 🤔
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I love this scene with Myrna Loy that is all about choosing colour and how we define it from the 1948 monochrome film “Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House” – somehow the film wouldn’t be quite the same in colour – and I’m sure I have a spool of that thread somewhere!
“Muriel Blandings: I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin’s egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don’t let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room. I’d like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshine-y. I tell you, Mr. PeDelford, if you’ll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter, and match that exactly, you can’t go wrong! Now, this is the paper we’re going to use in the hall. It’s flowered, but I don’t want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There’s some little dots in the background, and it’s these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now for the powder room – in here – I want you to match this thread, and don’t lose it. It’s the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it’s practically an apple red. Somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan. Oh, excuse me…
Mr. PeDelford: You got that Charlie?
Charlie, Painter: Red, green, blue, yellow, white.
Mr. PeDelford: Check.”
I grew up in the West of Scotland where two particular colours – green and blue – are intrinsically linked to two football teams and therefore are also a strong indicator of which religion you follow. Colour becomes a badge for religion and a weapon for sectarianism.
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There is a small yarn producer less than an hour from my home that chooses the most
imaginative and accurate names for their yarns. Two of my favorites are a variegated brown, reddish brown, gray and gold titled “Rust in Peace” and the other is warm yellow-gold titled “Tupelo Honey”. I combined to two in a shawl and it’s always the first one I grab from my stash as the colors make me happy.
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When I asked our decorator to paint our master bedroom with a colour called Hare, he gave me a very sideways look. However, it turned out beautifully. I love to watch hares running in the wild and I can honestly say that the paint colour is nothing like that of the live hare’s fur. That has so much variegation in it and is gorgeous in itself, but our walls, too, seem to alter their hue according to changes in the quality and quantity of light throughout the day. Perhaps that is why it can be so hard to pinpoint exact shade names; they are so rarely static to our perception. There must be an art to it.
Another colour name I love is that shade of Italian blue called celeste. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? (Thanks to my Mum and Dad.)
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After years of painting rooms in our house according to our whims, those of our children and serendipitous paint chip reveries, with the nest empty on a daily basis, we decided to hire a consultant to give our home a “coordinated” paint look. The Benjamin Moore consultant did a fine job and took into consideration the often grey skies of Vancouver BC. The chosen palette comprised various intensity depths of taupe with door frames, crown moulding being bright white and ceilings being a light mushroom colour. The ideas were good and we used them finding that even on a bright sunshine-y day, the rooms looked good. The surprise pop of colour was reserved for our main floor Powder room and is “Louisiana Hot Sauce” a rich deep red which I love to this day. Colour is so important to me in my space and even more so when I am knitting with it.
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When I was young, my box of crayons had a colour called “flesh”. To me, it was an odd name. What was flesh? It sounded like “vlees” ( Dutch for meat) or “fleisch” (German, also meat). But it certainly wasn’t the colour of meat. Friends said it actually meant “skin”… however, no one I knew had skin that pastey yellowy-pink colour.
Turquoise was a colour that intrigued me. It sounded so exotic – from a far off land of adventure and mystery. Now I have a friend from that far off land who dyes her hair turquoise, drives a turquoise car, and has any kind of turquoise accessory she can find. And she is exotic, adventurous and mysterious – everything that I imagined about that colour.
One of my sons loves green. When he was little, he had a favourite shade of green that he preferred. He called it “morning green”. Where he picked that name up, we had no idea. He said it reminded him of the sunshine on the leaves and grass in the morning. Logical to him. It is a particularly bright shade of light yellowish green. Difficult to describe, but I always know it when I see it.
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As a non-native english speaker, the colour name ”chartereuse” has always baffeled me. I can’t picture it. I’m Swedish and we mostly use the word orange for orange colour, but before oranges were widly common we used the word ”brandgul” which literally means the yellow of fire. I think that is an evocative colour name that needs a revival.
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For my wedding, quite some time ago, I wanted this one colour of lipstick I had in my mind. So I tried to explain the colour to my friend who worked in a well known makupstore. I tried it with a darker slightly brown pinkish red.. No this wasn’t it… Eventually we open almost every tester until I found this one shade I wanted so desperately.
When my friend saw the colour she bursted out : ” oh it’s Rotten Strawberries you want”
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We have an Australian dyer, Drover and Classer, who has a beautiful wedgewood-y blue yarn called Sybil’s Dress. That conjures up thoughts of a lovely cotton frock on someone running through a paddock of long grass to me. Also the company Tarndie have some colours I love dyed on their Polwarth Origins yarn. I especially love the names Persimmon and Ciderhouse Red.
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I love ‘Cerulean Blue’, which evokes images of the gorgeous Cerulean Warbler. I’m lucky enough to live very close to a river path where these endangered birds are found, and their rich sky blue tones are a delight.
According to Windsor and Newton, in their Colour Story for Cerulean Blue, “ the word cerulean comes from the Latin caeruleus, meaning dark blue caelum – which in turn probably derives from caelulum, meaning heaven or sky.”
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Cerulean was going to be my choice too! Cerulean is the name of a crayons crayon color, and as a small child it was my coveted favorite crayon. It reminded me of the deep blue of the sky in pictures of a very clear day. I was one of those children who reads a word before hearing it in context, so for quite a while I said it “SAIR-you-lean”. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was “se-ROO-lee-in.”
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Cerulean, celadon==I love both the shades and the words. I also love Payne’s grey–I wonder who Payne was?
It’s so interesting that so many of us were fascinated by the big box of Crayola crayons as children. I loved all the names and also arranging them by hue. I was gradually able to really see the subtle differences–how close to blue or yellow a particular green was for instance.
The experience of seeing color in the world is one of my greatest small joys in life.
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Same in Irish. Grass, for example, can be described as ‘gorm’ (blue) or ‘glas’ (green). ‘Glas’ can also mean grey (which is also called ‘liath’) and tends to refer to lighter or darker hues of green, whereas vivid greens are more likely to be called ‘uaine’. Steel blue and light blue are both ‘liathghorm’ (grey-blue), though steel-blue can also be ‘glasghorm’… I’ve recently got back into painting, and am really glad I don’t have to rely on Irish for colour names!
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Thank you – these variations and overlaps are so fascinating!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Payne_(painter)
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After my divorce I enjoyed my freedom to paint my house in the colours that I wanted! I chose Charlotte’s Locks from Farrow and Ball. It was very interesting which guests liked it and who didn‘t. It is a very adventurous red/orange! Now I have moved to an apartment and wanted all walls in white, for a restart.
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I did something very similar when I was divorced. My ex- and I had always had white rooms. My kids and I chose colours that we all loved – so for a while the house looked like a tube of smarties or bag of skittles – every room was painted in a different colour. What fun we had choosing them!
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Our home still looks like a tube of Smarties, though mostly pastel ones!
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The comment of mosesdleon is very interesting because it makes it clear to me how important the cultural and experienced background seems to be for the perception of the colours and there names.
As a French native speaker, the term „puce“ has an additional connotation, namely it is very often used as a pet name for little girls! So I imagine a shade called „Puce“ as a lovely shade of pink (I don’t know the colour you’re talking about).
Paola’s comment on the colour duck egg also shows the influence of the individual background on the perception of the colour names and probably also the colour itself. Anyone who has never seen a green duck egg will not be able to imagine a color with this name.
This also reminds me of an experience I had in Madagascar when I was working there.
One day my translator asked me why oranges (fruits) have the same name in French as the colour? This seemed completely incomprehensible to him, since the oranges in Madagascar do not turn orange at all due to the lack of the required cold stimulus for the color change (<12 degree Celsius), but remain green with a hint of yellow.
The colour orange thus did not have the same meaning for him as it does for me and probably for the majority of people in the more northern countries who clearly associate the colour with the fruit.
Interestingly, the classification of colours into colour families also seems to be made culturally distinct. For example, I was very surprised that in Malagasy the colour pink means "mavokely" which translates to "little yellow" (mavo = yellow; kely = little, small).
While for me there is no obvious relationship between yellow and pink, in Madagascar there seems to be a grouping. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to pursue such mysteries any further. In addition, I got to know the Malagasy way of thinking and the associated language far too rudimentarily to understand this "mystery".
Kate you have chosen such an interesting topic for this next club! I'm looking forward to all the always highly inspiring content for mind and needles and can't wait for it to start!
Thank you
And before I forget: Bristol blue has left a lasting impression on me because of the whole cultural and historical background
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Cornflower!! As a little kid, I just loved that the particular shade of blue in the crayon box was nothing like the color of corn (silly adults!), and I still think it’s one my favorite shades of blue today.
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I painted my yarn room – yes, i have a yarn room – in a fetching shape of blue named “Tricia’s Eyes”. I loved the color but i always wondered about this “Tricia” who inspired that name. How close is this to her eye color and what the conversation was between the namer of the color and the Tricia who inspired the name. Also, and it may be a little weird and dark, but what if she could see the rooms that are painted with her “eyes”
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Two things spring to my mind on this subject.
1. When I was at school I discovered “Prussian Blue”, which I adored. I wasn’t an “arty” child, but I used this colour at every opportunity, with its glorious almost-hint of green in the dark blue. It’s name evoked far off, darkly exotic ideas, thought I’m still not certain I know where Prussia is/was.
2. Chartreuse. In my head it’s pink. Can’t do anything about it, it’s definitely a garish pink. I’ve heard some people say it’s some kind of yellow, or something…? ;-)
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1. Prussia – state of pre-Germany. Sort of northeast, south of Denmark. Otto von Bismark as Chancellor, mid-late 19th Century, provoked wars with neighbouring ‘Germanic’ states to build ‘Greater-Prussia’, ultimately Germany. ‘Nicking’ Alsace from France kinda helped provoke WWI. (How’s that for remembered ‘O’ Level History, fifty years on?)
2. Chartreuse – as I’ve seen it is a kind of very light, yellowish green. I think pink would look better. Though after too much, you might just see pink elephants. Or white mice, which is apparently what the Germans (Prussians?) say.
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While my parents loved dark blue (mother) and grey (father), I have always loved the whole rainbow of colours. I like all the bright shades, even pastels need to have a certain quality of richness and brightness for me. (Otherwise I find them colourless or washed out.) I can still describe a large variety of grey and blue shades, even some blacks. –
I have always found it very difficult to describe colour to other people, they do not seem to see the same colour. My husband and I always argue about blue and green shades. There are shades that I think of as blue, look green to him.
And then I learned English as a foreign language and everything became more complicated. Colours are described differently in another languages. That’s when I started to collect colour and shade cards. I once found a lovely shade card of Dulux in Britain with bunnies in all sorts of colour on it. I framed it and kept it for years.
The most weired word for me is “Pantone” for a colour system, even if I think this system is a good idea.
I like English shade names like china blue, duck egg, tudor red, American ink. I like the words, I like the shades and I feel they describe something special. These words bring good memories to me.
I always lough at the German “Flaschengrün” (bottle green). I like words like “Frühlingsgrün” (spring green) and “Maigrün” (May green), though I am not into green at all. Associations with those words are still positive.
When I hear the word “indigo”, the first picture on my mind is a pale yellow turning into green, before I remember all the beautiful blue indigo dyed cloth from different parts of the world. During my chemistry studies, I had to learn about colours of course. And our experiments with indigo were just magic, so the changing colour comes to my mind with the word. I like the word “Echtschwarz” (true black) and think it has a down-to earth quality, while “ebony (black)” reminds me of fairy tales.
So far I have not mentioned my favourite colors for clothes , which are warm yellows, orange and rust, bright blue or turquois and red. These words don’t mean anything to me, while I love what they represent.
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My Mum and I would often disagree as to what various colours were. eg: a pair of brocade curtains I saw as ‘orange’ she called ‘gold’.
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Ok – what is carnation Pink? A carnation is so many colors and pink is pink right? Ha! I’m a coral fan – but coral can be more pinky or more peachy/orange. I had a favorite cotton turtleneck that I wore for years that lent itself to a more bright shade with a strong pink, but pink is not my color – go figure. I really like a coral that is more peachy. So the bottom line is that coral is a good color on me and depending on the shade can be a fabulous color for me. Comments?
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Hello KDD & Co, This email isn’t a comment on the blog below, but a request for assistance in understanding the directions in the Argyll::Argyll vest pattern. I’m at Step 3, setting the underarm stitches aside which states to slip 6 stitches (my size) each side of the marker to waste yarn. The first marker, which marks where the round was joined contains my working yarn (see attached photo please). I don’t know how to slip these stitches but keep the working yarn available. I checked on Ravelry to see if there were any comments about this and have also consulted my more talented knitting friends. No luck. Could you advise please on how to handle this. I really don’t want to give up on the vest. Many thanks.
Elizabeth
Elizabeth Dillon Victoria, BC, Canada
Sent from Outlookhttp://aka.ms/weboutlook ________________________________
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Hi Elizabeth – can you email us so we can assist? help@katedaviesdesigns.com
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As a biologist, i first used color charts to characterize soil layers (with Munsell Soil Color Charts), and then used that same set of charts to describe the colours of mushrooms. If the mushroom colours were not in the Munsell set we used Methuen’s Handbook of Colour (by Kornerup & Wanscher). These two books used codes for the colours. But, the book used by mycologists in the USA was Ridgway’s Color standards and nomenclature (published in 1912, online available at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/144788), a book that was not widely available but, it used colour names, and those were beautiful: ‘primuline yellow’ ‘prout brown’ etc.
as a knitter the first colour names for yarns i came across were those of Brown Sheep yarn, and because of that they’re still my favourites! Chocolate Kisses !
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Else, are you in the ‘All Over’ Ravelry thread? I don’t think I’ve met anyone outside work who knew what the Munsell Colour Chart is :-D
From Cactusgardener
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hi Cactusgardener – no i’m not, but i could!
you should check out the Ridgway – also nice little chips with beautiful colours!
i’ve only used the small Munsell – the soil charts
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Adobe…a beautiful color? I live in New England in an old farm house. It is beautiful here, yet here is no place for adobe anywhere in our home, in my clothing or in my outdoor landscape. When I set foot in New Mexico, adobe abounds and it becomes the most amazing color to me, instantly my favorite. Color and place have a strong connection for me.
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Adobe is dried earth? I gather New England has a ‘Mud Season’ – what sort of shade is that?
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Farrow & Ball colour shade ‘Mizzle’ – just love this descriptive word. As I look out of the window today, the Cornish mizzle is on fine form. This is the colour I see obscuring the fields and hedgerows. A soft wetness with a hint of green.
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I cannot resist shade cards, for pretty much anything! Yarn, paint… I am a particular fan of colours in the bluey-greeny-grey family: teal, celadon, duck egg.
However, for my hallway I decided to try something a bit bolder, a saturated mid-green. Somebody recommended Valspar paints, who have the most extensive racks of shade cards I’ve ever come across. They also have colour names that are nearly all bad plays on words. I chose ‘Whirled Peas’ in the end – yes, groan, a terrible pun, but the colour is exactly the same as pea puree.
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I work as a geologist and my mentors have always taught me it is viewed as somewhat unprofessional to use all these great vivid names derived from things to describe a colour of a rock or soil. “Light pink” is ok, “salmon pink” is not. Which is a pity because I love these names and they are (in my opinion) way more precise as well. Well, when on site I have always relied on my personal colour descriptions to recognize the same layer in different boreholes and only changed them to their bland “professional” versions at the report stage. Now that I got my professional license I am responsible for my reports myself, and I sometimes smuggle in a little “golden”, “emerald” or “raspberry” here and there if the colour really merits them (yes one really finds these shades in soils sometimes!). It makes me so happy to see them in print :)
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We painted one large wall that spanned the living room and dining room in our previous home “pink poinsettia”. I loved it.
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My Windsor and Newton watercolours ; Caput Mortuum , iron oxide that is a beautiful purple brown, Opera Pink, almost shocking, and Green Gold, the colour of the ash tree leaves at the moment.
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It should be Opera Rose, not Opera Pink, my mistake. That sounds more like a lovely lady than a lovely colour!
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All the oil paint colour names are beautiful: Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber etc etc, just the description of what they are made of and how is lovely. But there was a paint shop in Notting Hill in the 1990’s that made beautiful colours, especially a deep, dark, Yves Klien-esque blue that they called Betty Too Blue. It was so intense it felt three dimensional, you didn’t need much, I used it for a beam in my house, left when a wall had been taken out, and even my husband, who liked white a lot, loved it. The first large wall you come across when you visit The California Institute of the Arts is painted in a similar blue, and I remember decided togo there before even speaking to anyone, just because of that blue.
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I gather there was a shade during the Twenties called ‘Elephant’s Breath’, which I think an amazing, evocative, but totally uninformative name.
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Favourite colours? Greens-Blues-Purples. When ‘Deep Periwinkle’ was The shade last spring I bought a lot of Aran weight yarn to knit a cardigan. Then came Summer, and a cotton/bamboo mix jumper in a blue-green shade which name I can’t remember! Do not get old, Kate!
Now I’ve started on your Kildalton in the Deep Periwinkle, which I think a lovely name. Once I’ve sorted the set up row I’ll be away.
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Is there anything more evocative than the Farrow and Ball color Elephants Breath? I can feel that color brushing again st my skin.
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I once had a carpet salesman advise me against putting “dead deer brown” carpet in my house. I think I did though.
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When I travel I seem to develop colour memories. I spent a month in and around Florence Italy. When I see Tuscan yellow, a flood of memories come back about Tuscany and the specific yellow used to paint so many buildings in Florence like the Ponte Vecchio. I was told by a very passionate art supply store there that it had to be a very specific mix of ingredients to make it the “true” Tuscan yellow. And the glow that colour radiated from the buildings when the sun was in that magic hour before it sets…
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Cerulean blue. It sounds celestial. Sky blue is my favourite colour and I love the colour of the Australian midday sky. I also love the name Madder Lake, and Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna remind me of my first trip to Italy.
I think Perkins Purple sounds awful. I imagine some loud shiny colour,
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Cerulean blue. It’s sounds quite celestial to me. The colour of the bright midday sky here (in Australia) is my favourite colour. I also love the names Madder Lake, and Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna/Siena which remind me of childhood paintboxes and my first ever trip to Italy.
As an aside there was an Australian band of the late 60s called Madder Lake……
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In the southern United States there is a color called Haint Blue, which is often used on the ceilings of a home’s front porch. Traditionally, a “haint” is a haunt or ghost, and the color is to mimic the sky, which will attract the ghost to leave and therefore protect the house. Other entomology says that the blue ceiling keeps away wasps. It is a very light blue with a touch of green.
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I once lived in a rented house in Boston with a blue-ceilinged porch. I loved that ceiling, which looked like the sky, but never knew its significance. Thanks for the info.
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I learned the names for the heraldic colours when I was about ten, and felt as though I had access to a secret code. They’re mostly just French names for colours, but azure, the heraldic term for blue, always seemed like a magical and exotic term, evocative of medieval pageantry and far-away lands. Later I learned that it derived ultimately from a Persian term for lapis lazuli, itself a term which carries resonances of something rare and precious, echoed in its sound. And azure also has a specific meaning – the deep, intense blue of an unclouded sky, one of the archetypal colours of Australian summer.
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I’m loving this club already, and it hasn’t even started! Thanks for getting us all thinking about color, Kate.
I, too, used to love the Crayola Crayon color names. How funny that periwinkle fascinated me, too–perhaps there really are colors with power to reach into the human psyche! Perhaps, too, many of us play with crayons before we can read and then only discover the intriguing labels some time later. It gives us a brand new perspective on a familiar tool. I found the “burnt umber” and “burnt sienna” names mysterious and intriguing, but I didn’t love either color.
One other thought about color names and the way they often evoke a place, general or specific: A writer I love called Richard Nelson once taught a workshop, and a student asked him why he used so many specific place names–streets, local natural features, etc.– in his writing even though he knew his readers wouldn’t need those exact locations. He said that the names of roads and bays and streams and forested hills matter because a community has chosen to assign those names and to single out those features. Names are a reflection of what people value and who they believe they are.
I think of him every time I pass a little road here in Concord, Massachusetts called “Squaw Sachem Road.” Our town is one of the oldest in the nation; for nearly 300 years, citizens have held on to a name that honors a Native American chief who was also a woman. (Note: It was a sign of respect for the Massachuset people to avoid speaking the names of their leaders, so the generic term was actually the precise name she went by during her time as their leader.)
I don’t know if all of this is true for color names universally, but I find it is very true of *yarn *color names, especially yarn in Britain. That connection to place is one reason I so enjoy British yarns!
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Not my favorite, but has anyone talked about Rowan yarn color names? I mean Angel Tears? What color is that? Romantic but…………. not helpful
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I love Rowan’s ‘Vaseline Green’! …and it is!
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Nail varnish colour- Back Seat Red.
Am guessing you already know the book, Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair?
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I can’t think of a colour name that stands out to me particularly right now, though I know there have been some, but I find the names of the colours of things I’m considering using, or especially wearing, to be a significant factor in whether of not I’ll choose something. If colours are identified with numbers of basic names (red, yellow, light brown) I don’t really care and choose based on the colour itself, but if the colours are identified with more interesting names (caramel, buttercup, blackberry) I find I have to like both to be comfortable with the colour. The colour name will also often become part of how I refer to the finished project (i.e., my caramel sweater). I remember finding a really lovely red handspun at a craft fair once, just perfect for a scarf, but it was called ketchup and no matter how much I looked at it and tried to ignore the name I couldn’t imagine myself wearing a ketchup scarf.
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Wonderful answers and I am not sure ‘my’ colour has a name but I call it Obscene Green…you know, that yellow/green that is in your face! All my friends know that it is My colour ! I really liked the Rijksmuseum colour wheel. Muted.
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My Favourite colour name——shaela
I was very close to my grandfather. Father had to leave for England (RCAF) shortly before I was born and Mother stayed with my grandparents.
Grandfather had been a shepherd in Scotland and sorely missed his sheep and his dogs. At least I was named after a sheep, sort of ,and not one of his dogs.
Not particularly fond of the colour Shaela—I tend to jewel tones.
But my name is, love it or not:
Shaela
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Well, this is certainly food for thought. I’ve never honestly remembered colour names per say, although I certainly enjoy breaking down the colours used to make intriguing colours. I once had a painting teacher who spoke ‘colour’ in the same way I did. We discussed (in great depth) a colour I’d run out of during an ongoing painting class so I could mix my own and finish the homework. When I got to class it match exactly the bottle of colour I was supposed to be using. The other students didn’t believe we’d done the ‘mixing’ over the phone….but it was soooo wonderful to talk to someone who really loved/talked colour with the same language I did.
I do notice however that as my age increases my love of bolder, multi-layered richer/fuller colours catch my interest much more than in my younger less adventurous years of colour knitting (I tended towards safe colours as Brandon Mably once told me…lol). Saying this I have also noticed dear friends/ family of more advancing years turning more towards the lighter/softer pastel type shades in their knitting…having tended to the bolder when they were my age.
I certainly think colour brings added joy to the life of a knitter and when you achieve a colour combination that really sings, you literally see peoples faces light up in a different way when they see the knitted piece for the first time. And I’ve noticed over the years that people are more apt to comment about said piece with a happy lilt to their voice.
Looking forward to this club.
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Hi Kate
I am from Australia. My favourite colour is Peacock Blue. Whilst we have peacocks in zoos here, we do not have them wandering around stately homes like I have seen in the UK. The sparkling blues and greens in their neck feathers is just so beautiful.
The other colour I love is the red earth of the Australian Outback. A total contrast to the beautiful scenery you have in Scotland, but quite breathtaking when seen in person. It contrasts so beautifully with the sky blue.
Cheers
Jann P
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Periwinkle. I love that name, and the color too. You couldn’t be sad in Periwinkle clothing. It is a happy name and a happy color!
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After many years of living in apartments, I bought my own place in 2006. I could paint the walls for the first time, and escape the sterility of Landlord White! My bedroom had vaulted ceilings and we lived in a very cold climate, so I painted the walls a gorgeous red called Rose Parade, by Benjamin Moore. It was a deep, bluish red that was so warm and cozy in the middle of February, it made me want to dance whenever I went through the door.
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When I first started teaching I worked in a school for profoundly disabled children. We had no teaching aids unless we made them ourselves. I went off to a paint shop and explained the situation and told them I wanted to try and teach some of them their colours. The paint shop was incredibly helpful. They gave me all the old colour cards they could find. I made matching games and we did “art” with “all the yellows” and “all the reds” and “all the….” I discovered a lot more about colour as I worked with those children. One of the biggest thrills was one of the children pointing to the sky one day and saying “blue” and then at the grass and saying “green”.
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Duck Egg
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I have always loved the color names of Rowan Kidsilk Haze yarns – I mean, poison?
My bedroom is painted in Sherwin-Williams shade Knitting Needles, which is pretty much the color of Inox Gray needles (do they still make them that color?). It really was the color I was looking for, but that name sealed the deal!
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I have a friend who has a beautiful time trial bike, the frame of which is a deep pink colour – he calls the colour “Mangenta”. cracks me up
also I have a hard time not buying yarn/fabric when the shade is “saffron”
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My favourite shade name is ‘Tea with Florence’ from Little Greene. But if you’ve never seen it I would recommend the magic roundabout film “Dougal and the Blue Cat’ in which Dougal has to correctly guess the shade names of a succession of blue doors. It’s a favourite film of Mark Kermode.
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“Sea of Midnight” – a defunct Kelly Moore paint color (in the US) from about 15 years ago. A beautiful deep blue-green. Beautiful color, and such a lovely, evocative name for it!
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What could be more evocotive than Nile Blue? When I was little and my mother oil-painted I would be so happy to come home and smell that happy smell of turpentine because I knew it meant a good day. All her paints had wonderful mysterious names like cerulean and naples yellow, but my favorite was Nile blue (which was more green, as I remember it.) I have always wanted to go to Egypt and see if the Nile really is that color.
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Not a specific answer, but…recently, on a visit to relatives I played a game called ‘Hues and Cues.’ It’s pretty simple: there are 480 color squares arranged in a spectrum grid. A player secretly picks one and gives it a one- or two-word name that they think best describes it. The others try to select the square that they think matches the name. It was a fun challenge to pick the perfect word/phrase that exactly differentiated one color from its very similar neighbors.
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Oh my. I came here thinking that my favorite name for a colour is quite unusual, and then it’s already been mentioned twice. Who would have thought ‚Celadon‘ was so popular…
But I have another one, the bolder sister to Celadon : Chartreuse. For some reason it makes me think of festive balls, magnificent gowns, and absinthe.
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I was very lucky as a young teenager as my Aunt lived in Hawick, the Scottish home of cashmere, and sometimes she would send send my Mum cashmere yarn, and me ‘hand me down’ sweaters beautifully knitted by her for my cousin. I had a hand me down sweater knitted in ‘Chartreuse’ cashmere; I doubt I could wear that colour today but I still vividly remember it.
Your comment about ball gowns reminded me of a lovely silk gown I once saw in what I would call ‘Chartreuse’ and it had a dullish purple sash. Just beautiful.
‘Chartreuse’ is the name of a liqueur made by monks in France, named after the location of the monastry in the Chartreuse mountains, and is indeed a similar colour to absinthe. (Must taste better though; absinthe has to be one of the most disgusting tastes ever!)
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Speaking of Crayola, which has had such an influence on so many of us, Kristin Adreasson wrote a great song called “Crayola Doesn’t Make the Color of Your Eyes.” Bonanza is a great outdoor paint name, it’s a medium green in the blue range. I painted my shed and back door this color. Very fitting for New Mexico. Mostly I just LOVE seeing ALL the colors, of paints, crayons, pens, yarns, threads, anything all together. Choosing just one is never as satisfying, perhaps it’s in the dreaming of the new drawing/embroidery/sweater that I like the best. All the possibilities seem limitless!
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Ever since I discovered acrylic paints while I was in high school Cerulean Blue caught my attention. Then, when I actually bought a tube I saw that it lived up to it’s name and add a touch of white or yellow and whoa! Yup. I’d say Cerulean Blue has been my favorite for a year or two (I’ve been out of high school for 47 years).
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Growing up, my favorite color name was burnt Sienna. I had no idea what Sienna was, let alone burnt Sienna, and it just seemed so much more exotic then green or brown even canary. Also, it was only available in the 64 color box of Crayola crayons, so it was both exotic and precious.
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Renaissance yarns did an Elizabethan range complete with some great period names such as ‘goose turd green’ and ‘dead Spaniard’–makes you actually want to use those dull background colours that feature in so much crewel work…
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‚Frog on the wall‘ is one of my favourite colour(names) as well as ‚Rock Lichen‘ or ‚Dark Crocus‘‘ – I can image a picture and always remember the shade in my mind. Colournames are so much more fun that mere numbers. Looking forward to learning more in the club.
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I had à car à long time ago and its colour was polynésien turquoise. It just seemed an amazing name for paint. It wasn’t à lucky car and the paint proved totally unmatchable.
But i’ll never forget the name and I still love the glorious, never to be totally replicated, colour.
So looking forward to the Allover club!
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I’m surprised no-one has so far mentioned the Farrow & Ball paint shade card which contains some wonderful names. My all-time favourite is probably Dead Salmon (it’s a lovely beige-y pink). But there are some other excellent names: Eating Room Red, Charlotte’s Locks, Down Pipe and Hopper Head.
Someone earlier mentioned Celadon, and I agree – it’s a wonderful green and the name is so mysterious.
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I love shade names, although I also feel sometimes they can be somewhat restrictive and push imagination in certain directions (similar to what Felix mentioned). I think i like names and naming things in general – I name my knitted projects even when there is no pattern to follow and those often reflect the colours used – and sometimes the names of the shades used – I named one of my non-pattern sweaters “Mystic Island” because the names of the yarn used were “Lundy island”, “Little mermaid” and “Playing with Fauns” – in my mind, the sweater is thus somehow not just a piece of clothing, but almost a story created from those name-evocations with a physical manifestation of the knitted object. I think it is usually names that strongly suggest other modalities (smells, sounds, haptic feelings), resonate with specific memories or mostly, have sort of “storytelling potential” that draw my attention. Recently I bought a skein of Tukuwool in shade “Auri”, only because of the name. Were it called “light grey”, I would not have bought it, but Auri is the name of a favourite literary character and although I have no idea whether there is any connection between the shade name and the character name, it simply called to me because of this association.
Magenta being mentioned in the comments reminded me of a super interesting long rant I read recently about how it in fact does not exist (in a physical sense) and how our brain just makes it up (it makes other colours too, but those often exist – like yellow, we just do not have the receptors to actually see it). Fun things to think about!
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Like many here, I have to thank Crayola for some of my favorite colors and color nomenclature, but my mother supplied the crayons as well as many more color terms and experiences via paints and fabrics. Two favorite colors and color names I first learned from her are “cerise” and “chartreuse”, both exemplified for me by some fabulous clothes of hers. Turquoise and the various blue-greens and green-blues were also among her favorites and mine. Going back to Crayola, which introduced me to my beloved “magenta”, “burnt sienna” was also important because it was the color of my dog, whom I frequently portrayed; the intriguing name was a bonus.
The oddest color name I know, however, was the result more than a decade ago of a determined search among the Kelly Moore paint chips for just the right shade of off-white interior wall paint, neither brownish nor urky beige or garish white. It’s still on my walls today, the best friendly, unobtrusive neutral backdrop for all my stuff – but why did they name it “Western Acoustic”?
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I adore duck egg blue, both the name and the beautiful calm colour that it is!
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Dear Kate, my favorite Name is Poppy in paradise. I like red very mich and it reminds me of Field Full of poppies in France where I used to play as a child. Furthermore it is a sign of remenbering with respect for all these soldiers who battle for freedom and makes my Life better
as I am French. I only find it a Pity that a beautifull red is not possible to find. Kind regards
Valerie
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As a hand spinner/dyer/knitwear designer/maker, I like to name my yarns after whatever the inspiration for that yarn was, if possible, whether it’s a piece of music, a view, a light effect etc. One of my favourites is my ‘Sunlight on the Sea’ – a (commercial in this instance) blend of Merino and silk reminiscent of the sun on the wavelets on a calm sunny summer day. It has a companion called ‘Moonlight on the Sea’ in shades of darker blue, with silk. A blend of greens of my own dyeing was inspired by the Highgrove Suite and is named ‘Goddess of the Woods’. I’m sure you get the picture. My customers also seem to like the names and I do think that it can make a sale, just like the perfect buttons on a garment often does, whether th buyer realises it or not.
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I love paint chip color names! One of my favorites is called “filtered sunshine “, a somewhat grayed yellow! I used it on the bedroom ceiling!
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When I bought my first house the walls of the kitchen and family room were painted a reddish purple in a technique that looked like a child’s finger painting. Not a colour that was conducive to eating or socializing. I had it repainted in Annapolis Grey, a heritage colour from Benjamin Moore. What was really neat about the colour was the subtle change in it when hit with direct sunlight or you held a red object beside it. It then looked more green than grey. I really loved the colour.
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I, too, love all of the names for blues, but my favorite is ultramarine. As a child I thought that it meant extra blue. Also it made me think of swimming in the sea. When I later discovered that it meant beyond the sea, outremer, I liked the name even more. Then it seemed adventurous, a color that you would go to great lengths to find.
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uuu I’m feeling that this theme is going to be so full of wonderful stories, time travel and everything a knitter loves to talk about. (and listen) I’m counting down to the club start! As for the names of colors, when I was little, I had a box of beautiful gouaches, and two colors were forever engraved on me by the beauty of their name: carmine red and midnight blue (vermelho carmim e azul meia noite in portuguese).
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When we painted my son’s room he chose a muted green for the walls and “Apple Core” for the trim. It’s off-white with just a hint of green, very much like the core of a Granny Smith apple. It suits the room perfectly, and it makes me smile every time I go in there.
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I was having monthly Soirees in my lost in NYC in the 80s. I’d asked friends to bring poems or other written material to read aloud. One of my beautiful friends brought a fist full of paint chips that she got at the local paint store, and read them as a poem. So very sensual coming from her. Here’s a currant paint chip from Sherwin Williams paint. Impatiens Petal, In the Pink, Cheery, Coming up Roses, Eros Pink, Heartfelt, Valentine…..
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My loft was not lost. Too late to change the spelling. Ooops.
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When I was a child, my mother was a great knitter. There were six children to supply with warm woolly layers to keep us warm. I vividly remember the wool sample cards which she collected and which I loved to play with until they were a fibrous, colourful mess. For me Autumn colours bring me joy as I always associated them with going back to school (I loved school!). Those glowing, warm shades of yellows, oranges and deep reds. I love the colour name ‘Alizarin Crimson’ for the way in rolls off the tongue and the gorgeous deep red hue.
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I’ve always loved the paint color cards and their clever names. My favorite was a slightly grayed yellow that was called “filtered sunlight “! Used it on my bedroom ceiling!
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Here‘s another knitter who fell in love with the colors in the 64-count box of Crayolas. Magenta and the combination blue green and green blue were my absolute favorites, and remain so to this day. For me they seemed to evoke the Arabian Nights – rich and mysterious and slightly exotic.
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Like minds, Diane. Magenta and turquoise was my favorite combination, while blue-green and green-blue sang back-up. Still gorgeous, still my favorite colors.
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I’m not sure if it’s a shade name or only for paint, but I’ve always loved the word quinacridone!
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My house is painted Olive Sawdust. Is it green? Is it brown? That decision is truly in the eye of the beholder. I loved that name even before I chose the color. I wonder how much the name influenced my choice.
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I’m also a fan of colour cards, for anything from paint for the house to nail polish colours, I’ve collected them all. I’m a big fan of coloured nail polishes and I love the names given to the colours, it also amazes me how people think for them – check out Opi for an incredible range of colours and names. I’m also the person who collects felt tip pens and writing paper in many colours, years ago Paperchase used to sell sheets of paper in all colours and I brought loads – I just can’t help myself. My childhood memories of colour are of browns, and orange practical colours that took a lot of wear, now though I love yellows and oranges they are my happy colours.
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I love my watercolours Rose Madder, Indigo and Ochre Plants and minerals offering such beautiful shades
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Love the color cards! I work at a car dealership and one of the more fun aspects has always been the color names. Not just black, “asphalt black”. Slingshot yellow, pepper dust, toasted marshmallow, carbon flash, honey mellow yellow, jalapeno, velocity yellow and way back when – plum crazy!
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I too love colors and color names. For a while I tried collecting them under their basic category, such as blue. Land’s End was a good source then. (It quickly got overwhelming.) I also feel smug citing tone family names such as spectrum colors, pastel colors, or jewel tones.
But first prize goes to that Crayola box, whose names were quite accurate in utilizing the pigment term. They were delicious, instructional, and inspirational: teal, periwinkle, ultramarine, magenta, heliotrope. And who can forget wondering over”burnt” sienna, but “raw” umber? The last two were especially wonderful to say. (The only mistake in the box was that weird term, “flesh”.)
I feel sad that today’s kids, consumed as they seem by neon colors or even brighter, may be missing the pleasure and learning from these subtler, more complex colors.
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Puce. It’s a weird and slightly unpleasant word, with a weird and unpleasant history – ‘puce’ is ‘flea’ in French, although I don’t know if the colour is named for the biting bug itself or a range of faded bloodstains. I always feel I should dislike the colour, but oddly I don’t.
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, puce does indeed derive from the colour of a flea!
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When we built a home nearly 30 years ago, we were stuck on what color to paint the first floor walls and didn’t want to default to plain white (of course there are thousands of versions of white!). Our beloved contractor, a woman, helped us choose all the wall paint colors and we picked Olive Fog (Hirshfield’s, here in MN) for the open plan living room, halls and foyer. It is very good name for the shade of green it is (warmer than most whites) and was a terrific background to any furniture choices. Our new home, built with the same contractor 2 years ago, has Olive Fog in the greenhouse. The main living area walls are Repose Gray (I believe Sherwin Williams), a calming gray version of the green Olive Fog.
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One of my favourite shade names is Yell Sound Blue, from Jamieson of Shetland. The name seems utterly mysterious until you have some knowledge of Shetland, when you realise that the name and the shade describe each other perfectly.
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A few years ago, we painted our garden shed a warm brown colour called Tugboat. I have no idea why it’s called Tugboat – the name itself seems to suggest blues, aquas and icy whites. Even tugboats tend to be blue or red. It doesn’t make sense except that it’s a colour that I like. The colour is rarely produced now so I keep a sample card so that I can colour match it if I need more.
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It’s been fun reading all the comments this morning. I enjoyed them all! The crayon box comments brought back many memories.As I kept reading I thought there was nothing I could add. Then, I thought of one paint color name that still gets talked about in our family. Tranquil Retreat. Tranquil Retreat is a soft pink with a hint of tan to it. When I saw the color card photo, I immediately thought of my grandmother’s home. A definite retreat for me. Once on the walls, my sons asked the color name. They all laughed, saying I needn’t bother to have painted. With them grown and out of the house maybe it would be tranquil at times.
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It’s certainly not my favourite colour, but I still remember the colour I painted my first apartment. It was called Sahara Beige and it certainly made my place feel warmer.
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Some of my favourite names are from the Wild Wool range. I made a lovely jumper in the Icelandic style with Pootle, Meander and Brisk. No relation to the colours of gold, light blue and deep green, but the names do evoke what I will be doing while wearing it; I will pootle and meander, until it starts to rain then a brisk walk home!
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Peacock, teal, cerulean, ultramarine… there were so many shades of blue that moved towards green in the crayon box. I loved them all. Still gravitate to them for my clothing. My bedroom fabrics are all in coordinated shades of aqua and ivory, with rose accents. My living room is furnished in colors ranging from ivory to sage green to denim to ultramarine and navy blues. The color schemes feel calming yet fresh to me.
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New-oak-leaf-green is my favourite spring colour, for summer it’s hydrangea blue, cinnabar red and butter yellow for autumn, and ultramarine blue and aubergine for winter. Plant, flower, and mineral names appeal to me much more than some of the more whimsical colour names given to paints and yarns. I used to work in the textile industry and I remember once receiving a carpet sample book in which all of the carpet colours were named after characters in Scooby Doo. It wasn’t very evocative ;).
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Hi Kate, I am really excited about the all. Over club!
A beautiful color with a name that sits deep within me is ‘celadon’. I like the way the word rolls off the tongue, and that it is an ancient color with mystique and worldliness.
Lise, in New Hampshire
Sent from my iPad
>
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I’m always intrigued and amused by the names given to nail polish colors. Often they imply something vaguely naughty (Almost Nude, Hot Hot, Wicked), but the one that made me laugh was “Boxer Shorts”, a lovely pale blue color that I used for years. I assume that the person assigned to color name creation had a very specific memory of blue boxer shorts…
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I enjoy nail polish names, as well! Two current favorites are Devil Wears Nada, a very pale nude, and I Seafood and Eat It, which is a strong peachy pink.
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My evocative colour is duck egg, I can find this colour in yarns that come from Nordic countries or Anglo-Saxon countries, in Italy it is an uncoded and non-existent color
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My first exposure to a range of colors was my 64 count box of Crayola crayons in the 1960s. I still remember being intellectually challenged by the fact that there were “red-orange” as well as “orange-red” crayons. Apparently the first color name was dominant, but you could also interpret them as equal, just logically. Even the most basic color names can be confusing!
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Crayola colour names are so evocative: and surely the first encounter with the poetic potential of colour for many generations of children now! I have always loved the (biblical?) ‘Purple Mountains’ Majesty’, and ‘Razzle-Dazzle Rose’, because it reminds me of my sister’s name. Each Crayola crayon now features the colour names in several languages (English, Spanish, French) and it’s fascinating to see how the colour names sometimes easily translate between them, but at other times don’t, reminding us that the language of colour is often contingent on specific cultural context.
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Oh, poor Jane, I hope you were later able to explain the borrowing of the crayon.
I love teals purples and browns.
My favourite brown in knitting wool is Baa Ewe Ram’s Parkin which is a beautiful coppery Parkin colour. It reminds me of the Parkin my great Aunt Doris used to make especially for me when I went to stay. No one else was allowed to partake of this delicious treat.
Hessle is one of my favourite place names and is the name of a navy blue Baa Ewe ram yarn.
I don’t usually remember the names of colours but these two do seem to stick in my brain.
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My favorite colour is purple, but for odd names you must go to the Elizabethan times (the first), they had colours that were named: puke or dead spaniard or goose-turd-green. Lovely to knit with!
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I was hoping someone would mention goose-turd green. Other mildly scatological terms – slang only, probably never used “officially”: sh*t brindle, baby-sh*t brown. Yes, the sort of term you hear from people who grew up in the old Wild West. Certainly descriptive!
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When we bought our first ever house, we couldn’t afford to re carpet it (it hadn’t been touched for over 30 years) so we decided to paint the stairs what ever colour was on the sale table at the local DIY shop.
It was hazelnut. But forever known in our family as squirrel-sh*t. Even 30 years later it is still referred to as the squirrel-sh*t stairs.
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Oh, that is a great family story.
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You’ve reminded me of one of my favourite medieval descriptions of colour – ‘sad puke’! The drapers of Coventry are recorded as wearing robes for a fifteenth-century St George’s Day procession of ‘sad puke, tawney, or else off-brown blue which are nearly the same colour, and a hood, half tawney or puke, and the other half scarlet’. Saddening refers to dyeing using an iron mordant which darkens and dulls the colours, so sad puke is puke coloured, only darker.
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My first major renovation project after the death of my husband was adding a powder room by moving the pantry, etc. Making color decisions on my own was daunting, I wanted a peachy shade for the wall in the kitchen where the pantry had been. When I found the shade called “ cantaloupe” it was perfect. On second glance, the color name was “antelope”, but it’s still cantaloupe to me!
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Cantaloupe, antelope, what’s the difference? ;-)
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I first encountered shade names with my box of 128 Crayola crayons. Names like Burnt Siena, Periwinkle, and Magenta linger for life.
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Speaking of crayons, Cerulean evoked something otherworldly in me as a child, taking me into a vast sky or looking out over a dreamy sea.
Looking forward to the club!!
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Coffee. The name makes me think of the warm feeling when I drink a cup of perfect coffee in the morning. I love the dark brown color, and I love the smell of both wool and coffee.
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The story that came to mind was when we were building our house five years ago we had to pick a paint color for the trim on the outside of the house. We were looking at different shades of grey. When we had decided on the one we like the best we looked at the name and it was wool felt. Right then we knew for sure that was the one.
Additionally a number of years ago I came across a book on the DMC colors it is called The Very Stuff by Stephen Beal. The poems are listed by the color numbers of DMC. 816 The place Where The Colors Are Made …Oh, this is it, the place where all your dreams come true, where nothing is as it was and everything develops the potential of what it can be. Here is the stuff of change, the very stuff, and you can take it home and hold it in your hands. No paint will do, no paint will ever come close, when you can stitch your lover a heart of ruby red and say. This is the color –and the texture–of my love for you. Yes. this is the place where the colors are made. this is the place of joy.
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Earlier this year, Pantone developed the color of biodiversity (in collaboration with a number of NGOs to raise awareness of the threats to biodiversity). The colour – PANTONE 1775 C – is a shade of rose pink, apparently inspired by one of the earliest pigments on earth.
I’m a biodiversity scientist / ecologist, and that pink ist the last colour I would associate with biodiversity. It might simply be my upbringing in western Europe with its myriad shades of green. I spent more than a decade in the Southern Africa, and the first thing I noticed back in Europe where the incredible shades of green in a spring forest.
Having said than, my favourite colour is blue – the IKB 191 International Klein Blue – in particular. There is something about this shade that simply draws you in.
I love colour(s) and very much look forward to your club!
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Earlier this year, Pantone developed the color of biodiversity (in collaboration with a number of NGOs to raise awareness of the threats to biodiversity). The colour – PANTONE 1775 C – is a shade of rose pink, apparently inspired by one of the earliest pigments on earth.
I’m a biodiversity scientist / ecologist, and that pink ist the last colour I would associate with biodiversity. It might simply be my upbringing in western Europe with its myriad shades of green. I spent more than a decade in the Southern Africa, and the first thing I noticed back in Europe where the incredible shades of green in a spring forest.
Having said than, my favourite colour is blue – the IKB 191 International Klein Blue – in particular. There is something about this shade that simply draws you in.
I love colour(s) and very much look forward to your club!
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Puce! That was a colour my grandma identified for me and found it a very funny name. I can remember her laughing about it.
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Hurrah for shade cards and the forthcoming excitement of the Allover Club!!! Shade cards are so amazing. And so evocative and suggestive… one thing I’ve found in the past is that the names of yarns or colours can really interfer with/overdetermine my creative process of picking colours; for example if I am working on a design inspired by trees, I will want to use the shades with associated names – PINE, IVY, LEAF, BRAMBLE etc. even if the actual colour scheme requires shades with less associative names. I really like the neutrality of numbers naming systems for that reason though, in time, even these take on their own associations… when I was little I had a crayola crayon called periwinkle that was somewhere between a lilac and a dusky blue. I was extremely disappointed with how little pigment came off the crayon when I drew with it and remember labouring at a piece of paper, trying to force out a mark with the same colour intensity as the crayon itself. Relatedly, my mum was briefly an Oriflame rep in the 1980s and there was a dusky lilac/blue shade whose name I can’t remember, but baby Felix was totally obsessed with getting into the hallowed Oriflame case and playing with that colour.
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Oh my gosh, I love that story of the determined Baby Felix!
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I especially love all the ‘spice’ related shades: persimmon; paprika; (ochre); saffron. These names fairly literally link to the colours but, equally or even more importantly, the names evoke a sense, not just of the fabulous food and aromas but of the entire luscious culture of their country of origin.
My kitchen cupboard shows that I do cook with these spices and I have travelled around India , but I loved these colours and names even before doing either of these activities.
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As a general rule names of shades don’t tend to stick in my mind because very often they don’t seem to bear much connection to the actual colour, however one exception to this is when a friend painted the walls of her cosy little cottage in a colour called burnt tomato. This gorgeous, warm, rich red was perfectly evoked by the name l think because of the “eating “ connotations it conjured up, you could literally imagine “tasting” this colour.
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My favourite paint shade is ‘first light’ by little greene. I love this paint colour and we painted our house that we have just sold with lots of this colour. It is so reflective of light and makes a dull room seem much brighter than is really is. I have a feeling we will be using it again very soon! Somehow it changes the overall feeling of the room and lifts my spirits on a grey day, on a sunny day it just makes me feel happy. I love the shade card for Fenwick and Tilbrook too as they are a Norfolk paint company and use many local and coastal inspired names for their paint. I hadn’t really thought about how much I enjoy looking at shade cards until you prompted me with this post but I find myself considering them in a whole different way! I am so looking forward reading your essays on colour as I know they will also prompt me to examine my thoughts and choices in a different way, something that I find you do so very often. thank you Kate.
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My granddaughter, Amelie, loves to use the word ‘Teal’ in conversations about colour and this has been the case since she was a tiny tot learning to talk. She has always used it appropriately and seems to like the sound of the word itself. I wonder where she picked it up from?
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I too am an Amelie. Maybe teal is in the genes!
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My VERY favourite shade name is Magenta. When I was a kid my favourite coloured pencil in the packet was “ scarlet lake “ which was more magenta than anything. Over the years that bright hot pink has continued to be a favourite of mine. When I watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of my favourite people was “Magenta”. She epitomized everything to that colour means to me, hot, spicy, vibrant. Even to say that word, is not one you can as lightly.MAGENTA 😊😊
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My favourite colour is Magenta which is a bright pink/purple. It was my favourite crayon colour from the Crayola crayon box:)
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I tend toward muted shades of blue and greens as they remind me of sitting by the ocean with a cup of coffee.
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Sky blue – a warm, clear, still day without an agenda
Grass green – lush with life the way it should be
Midnight blue – when things are all settled down and the universe is open for suggestions
Horseback brown – warm memories of good four-hooved friends
Hare – a mottled mix of warm and fuzzy
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Continuing the crayon box theme, my favorite names from the color box were “burnt Sienna”–which probably evoked warm fires–and “ochre”, which I liked because I didn’t know how to pronounce it. That’s interesting because both are real earth tones, whereas if you asked me what colors or shades I liked, the answer would always be green or blue.
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I tend toward muted shades of blues and greens, as they remind me of sitting by the ocean with a cup of coffee.
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I love colour names that evoke smells, like spice, cinnamon, lavender, sage because you can immediately conjure up an extra association, a memory or a place.
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Taupe!
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Not quite an answer to your question Kate. However, one of my earliest memories is stealing the stub of a crayon from nursery school. Not because I wanted it, but because I didn’t have the words needed to describe that exact shade of warm buttery yellow and the only way to share that information with my mother was to show her. Of course, I was misunderstood and in awful trouble at what was interpreted as the first sign of criminal tendencies. I’ve never really had a single favourite colour; as it is certain SHADES of colour which appeal to me and set my senses singing.
By the way, I am very much looking forward to this club as I LOVE colour.
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I am looking forward to your essay, as this was actually my grandfather’s line of work, and I never knew him: He was trained as a chemist and worked as a traveling salesman in the Carolinas, selling color dyes to the woolen mills there. I know very little about his experience, but I sometimes wonder if the appeal of color palettes was baked into my DNA.
For me color names, like color palettes, are most evocative in the aggregate. Like Jane, I first recall being intrigued by both color arrays and color names in the box of crayons, going through and pulling them out one by one to read the labels. (I later loved the folk song a high school classmate wrote referencing those Crayola colors as each reminding her of a different friend). I also recalling starting rapt as a child at the display of dozens of felt-tip pens, arranged by hue, on the counter of our cozy local bookshop. Interesting that both color palettes were comprised of writing implements, because I find myself verbally stimulated by good color names (let me go write!) and artistically stimulated by colors (let me go knit!). I find geographic names are often among the more compelling, both when I know the place being evoked and find the color does seem to capture some essence of that locale, and when I don’t know the place but feel I have some new sense of it from seeing the attached color. Then you have delicious colors and words along with flights of imaginative fancy to all parts of the globe.
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