Okay, I haven't bought Adele's lining yet, but I may be on trend by accident beyond my wildest dreams...according to The Telegraph last Saturday.
Fashion telegraph "Blue-a-riot-of-colour-for-spring" Blue is in, in, in. I love how they quote the Anna Wintour character from
The Devil Wears Prada in this article, regarding the descent of cerulean blue from the heights of the catwalk to the discount bin. So what is Armani's colour for spring 2011, above? My eye sees a mix of Carolina Blue/Baby Blue.
I was interested in seeing if I really knew the difference between cerulean, sapphire, cobalt, azure and so on, and was astonished to find that Wikipaedia gives you a whole chart of blues, above. Isn't that beautiful? Did you know there was such as thing as Bondi Blue or Cell Blue, or Duke Blue? Not to mention Palatinate Blue, and
Egyptian Blue (I nominate that one the colour of the month!!! It's actually darker than my reproduction here but I didn't want to lose the lettering.)
Note they don't have cobalt, royal, and curiously, I don't see anything labelled plain ol' turquoise on this chart. I bet there are a lot of charts out there on paint websites, too, and they really jog the imagination away from school blazers and the Virgin Mary.
Now how do we get these blues into our wardrobe when we shop at the discount bin and not the catwalk? I mean why wait two seasons for these gorgeous colours to trickle down?
I discovered the most amazing tool for helping home dyers, which allows us to buy that bargain "natural" silk off Thai Silks etc, and choose a colour and discover the proportions of dyes to make it. (Frankly, not being a painter, I couldn't wrap my head around anything more complicated than yellow plus blue makes...um..green. And all the Playdoh mixed together makes it just a muddy mess.
It's something called the Dye Mixer, linked here
The Dye Mixer Applet, and you just add colours in various proportions and get...WOW! I could play with this thing all day. Although computer colours and dye-makes differ, this is a huge help to the dreamers in us who see, "Glaucous Blue," and don't know how to get even close.
Had a great chat today with my literary agent in London and I noticed a book moved off amazon. Even if you paid only a
penny for it, thanks for reading, whoever you are. My agent notices these things.
I don't want to get into dying fabric. Too much work for me! But I do look forward to wearing blue again. It's been a while.
ReplyDeleteI put it off, too, and then discovered that dyeing 2 metres of silk took half an hour, tops. A revelation, although I'm sure it would have taken more time if I'd mixed the dyes. We've been tie-dyeing all our summer t-shirts for years, using supermarket T-shirts bought in 3-packs, and I dye 3-metre lengths of cheap white Ikea cottons to use as seasonal tablecloths, so it's not the big deal you might fear. Have a go!
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