What story has no beginning or end? No hero, or villain; no love interest or irritating comedy sidekick..?
Well?
Stop sniggering at the back!
Come on now...
It's a "Colour Story" of course!
(well...d'uh)
Anyway, moving swiftly along...(abi wrote the bit above...honestly she did...*clears throat*)...
One of the greatest difficulties when designing patterns is deciding what colours to use to best sate the voices in your head...should they be pastel, neutral or bright? Intense and vibrant, or pale and interesting?
This decision can make or break a collection. Beautiful patterns can be ruined by the wrong colour choices, so getting your colour palette just right can be fraught with danger (well...not so much danger as difficult choices, but when your'e as indecisive as I am, believe me, making any sort of important decision feels dangerous...like "i'd rather be bungee jumping from a drunk-driven plane over a shark infested pool with no pants on" dangerous. Obviously I mean I have no pants on...I can't imagine any time when an infested pool *would* have pants on. Oh, and I don't know why my pantlessness makes it more dangerous, it just does).
To aid you in this arduous task, you start looking for colour combinations EVERYWHERE! From the books on your shelves, to the food on your plate- every shade and tone, every colour pairing could be THE ONE. You look at the colours of houses, and the cars outside them, the colour of flowers against the sky, your auntie's t-shirt against her bright peach hair (oh no, darling, my hair has *always* been so bright it's given off its own light), and so on. Nothing escapes your steely, colour-focussed glare to the point that you forget what you like- everything is a possibility and you start to doubt your own taste. "Is this nice? Is it? I can't tell anymore..."
Then something just happens...something clicks. You see a colour, or imagine a pairing and just know so completely that it doesn't matter if it's not what you had envisaged for the collection- you MUST use these colours for this pattern. Suddenly the pattern sings, and it has dimensions it didn't have B.C. {Before Colour}. Everything clicks and you feel like a genius.
{It's a lovely feeling}
Eventually, we decided on five colour stories, five groups of four shades. Over the next wee while we'll be showing you these colours, and, wherever possible, the photos we took, or the pictures we saw, that inspired them. Hopefully you'll enjoy this little sneaky peek in to what our collection will look like.
ryan@abigailryan
