The Language of Flowers: Knitting and Crochet Blog Week Day 4 - 4KCBWDAY4




As a redhead, I am invariably drawn to warm earthy colors—rusts, burnt oranges, forest greens, and deep claret colors.  I have made an orange tweed vest, a green poncho, an oversized deep green shrug with flecks of rust, a green sweater dress, and numerous green scarves, as well as a deep burgundy and brown shrug—to name a few items.

Yet when I look at my finished projects, I seem to also have a great deal of lavender, reflecting how again and again I am drawn to that soft shade.  According to Jacci Howard Bear's “Desktop Publishing Colors and Color Meanings” excerpted in an article found on Ask.com,Lavender has long been a favorite flower and color of genteel ladies. This shade of purple suggests refinement along with grace, elegance, and something special.”  She adds that it is “the color of feminity” and calls this shade “a grown up pink.”  As I’ve always been a fan of uber feminine Victorian interior design, it didn’t come as a surprise to me when I counted among my finished items a lavender lace shrug, a cabled heathery sweater, and a very girly soft purple capelet (from a pattern by the very girly designer Louisa Harding).

When examining my yarn stash, I find a dearth of lavender, though, probably because I like this hue so much that I tend to immediate cast on when I have some at hand.  I’m not a big stash acquirer, though, and tend to buy yarn for specific projects and then use it.  My yarn collection is more of a mixture of odds and ends left over from other projects.

I showed off this recently completed shrug a week or two ago on my blog. 

Interestingly, I hadn’t really thought about my affinity for this color until writing this blog post.  Immediately when pondering this topic, I realized that even my blogger page’s design reflects a predilection for this color.  My post on Tuesday of this week, discussing my thistle design for fingerless mitts (inspired by my Border Collie mascot), also echoes my attraction for this shade.

My affinity for this color is also reflected in other areas of my life, aside from knitting. 

I’ve heard that lavender is the favorite color of teenage girls, so I’m not sure how my attraction for it reflects my inner being.  Maybe I’m immature or perhaps sentimental, yearning for more innocent times.  This color certainly reflects my love of 19th novels and costume dramas which are rife with “genteel ladies” who live in worlds of grace and elegance I can only admire from afar. 




Note:  the photo of the leaves in the collage at the top of this page, and the apple in the collection at the bottom are not my own.  They were used with permission of CreativeCommons. 



Leaves photo credit: Stella's mom


Apple photo credit: leoncillo sabino

http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a>



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Comments

  1. Fascinating when one discovers something a little bit unexpected to one's conscious self and yet also something one has known subconsciously for a long time. I love lavender - it's the perfect balance of pink and blue both of which I also adore! Perhaps this means I can't make up my mind or something! May be we choose colours sometimes with the right side and sometimes the left side of our brains so that there will inevitably be two groupings. I like this idea because it's not limiting and actually holds together quite different colours with our own unique pattern of conscious and subconscious threads. So go for both! Earth tones AND lavender! Why not? E x

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  2. Well, given the thistle design (as well as your blog banner), your love of purple comes as no surprise. :)

    As a former humanities/literature major, I can certainly deconstruct why one might love a particular color. However, from a textile/design/historical perspective, purple was, for some time, one of the most expensive colors in which to dye textiles because the source of the color was in limited supply. So maybe you just love rich things. Yeah, I'd go with that. :)

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  3. I wish I was as good as you regarding stash management ... I love Voie's comment that you just love rich things! And your idea that you are young at heart! :)

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  4. I can see that you do like lavender:) The cables on your blog kind of give you away:) I like purple too. I am currently knitting a dusty purple cardigan:)

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  5. Lavender/lilac is a beautiful color...but I'm drawn to the same type of colors as you...although they tend to be in variegates....

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  6. Such beautiful inspirations. I love fall colors and lavender too.

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  7. i've never heard of lavender being a favorite among teenage girls! maybe i was in the wrong crowd all along in high school.
    it's neat how realizations like these happen--i love this blogging week challenge for this kind of stuff exactly!

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  8. Loving lavender and purple is nothing to be ashamed of in my book - I am a big lover of purple. Someone once told me that as w get older purple can be quite flattering to older skin tones, and traditionally it is associated with Royalty, mysticism and the supernatural. One of the reasons why Edward II's 'friend' was so despised was that he chose to wear purple - the sumptuary laws in Medieval Britain forbad anyone but Royalty from wearing purple as it was such an expensive colour to use. So there you go, purple is a GREAT colour! Judy.

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  9. I can see your love for lavender and I like how you write about it. :)
    I love lavender as a colour, though it does not suit me at all.
    I'm drawn to warm and earthly colours as well which do suit me.

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