I'm very pleased to share that as of this month, I'm a permanent member of the Colour Collaborative. I've always loved writing occasional guest posts so am really excited to be part of the group and to be contributing each month.
So, May. Our theme is 'Morning'. I gave this quite a lot of thought while we were away in Scotland last week and considered using some of the photographs we took from the deck shortly after waking each day; pictures of the loch and the mist moving across the mountains. But then I didn't.
You see, what I really love about this collaboration is the way we can each interpret the brief. And to me, 'morning' is all about routine. Familiar, comforting things and simple pleasures. Morning is when you're at your softest; recently awake and still a little bit fuzzy from a warm bed. It's before you ready yourself to face the world. And I like (whenever possible) a gentle start to my day. So the colour of my tea (Earl Grey, a tiny splash of milk) has to be just the right shade of brown.
My breakfast of choice: mashed avocado on toast. Green and nourishing and creamy and delicious.
A wander around our little yard, cup of tea in hand, often results in a few little snippings being brought indoors for the table. Even better if those snippings are what you'd class as 'weeds'.
In this house, we tend to live in the back room (the front's always freezing, whatever the time of year). And on a perfect morning - i.e. a sunny one - the back room gets lovely light coming in. It shines through and illuminates the flowers on the dining table. It doesn't matter which colour they are; they look as though they're lit from within.
The kitchen faces the same way and so the geraniums on the windowsills and whatever we happen to have growing outside in windowboxes are similarly lit. At the moment it's all reds in varying shades so on a reasonably sunny morning they glow warmly.
Even things which are colourless become more beautiful; fleeting rainbows appear on walls as the light's refracted through cut glass. And windowsills are filled with dancing shadows from the plants growing outside.
Here, in this house, the light makes a huge difference to your appreciation of colour. On a gloomy morning the high ceilings and thick curtains make it seem cavernous and oppressive. But on a sunny one everything seems to take on a life of its own and we're transported, Dorothy-like, from a monochrome Kansas to a glorious world of Technicolour.
Don't forget to visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, just click on the links below.
What is The Colour Collaborative?
All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.
