Colors and friends

Noticing colors in my life lately, mostly primary colors. Not my usual palette, but maybe suited to the dreariness of March days. Color is an easily accessible feast.

I’m doing watercolor exercises. Mostly color wheels right now. I used to be more ambitious about watercolor, but I got tired of feeling like I would never be good at it. I just like watercolors and I want to splash them around. At this point, I have a collection of paints so it’s a good activity to use what I have. My neighbor friend is a more accomplished watercolorist and we get together sometimes to paint and talk about color. The exercises give me something to do when we get together.

A different friend gave out some forsythia branches from a plant which had been uprooted in a careless accident. I’ve never forced forsythia in the house before, but its yellow frothy flowers are very uplifting.

I joined Mirrix’s latest weave-along for practice. The project was called “Prism” and it is a more bright and colorful design than I would probably ever come up with. It was a fun little project and gave me a lot of practice with the meet-and-separate technique. I have quite a lot of leftover yarns from the kit. The white border is silk thread which is slippery and harder to work with than wool.

After I finished that weaving, I rewarped the pipe loom and started the little weaving below. It’s going to be a star like one I noticed in one of Jude’s pieces. Weaving is challenging for me – translating the shapes into warp and weft does not come naturally. I had to work with a pencil and paper to sketch out the angles so I wouldn’t get them backwards. And I had to unweave twice (so far) because of mistakes getting the shapes the way I wanted them. I think I’m on the right track now. This yarn was a gift from a friend, a large hank of it in precut pieces just the right size for little weavings. Lots of colors. I may weave a constellation of stars. I have a lot of colors in my life. And I have some good friends around here.