not to be a hater, but...(color, demystified)
Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 11:25AM See part one of this series here.
Please don't take this the wrong way. It's not an indictment of your character, nor does it indicate whether or not I like you as a person.
But I hate football with the blinding passion of one thousand suns. The reasons are many. I will spare you the social commentary.
If you are a person who likes football, more power to you. You go right ahead and enjoy that. Just don't try to get me to partake, because I would rather do any of the following:
1. Stare at the back of my bedroom door.
2. Scrub pots.
3. Dig an 18"x18" hole in the ground and then fill it back in.
4. Assemble 26 entire alphabets from letters I clipped out of magazines.
5. Catalog 10,000 baseball cards.
Sadly for me, Minnesotans love football. My father and spouse love football. And that means I can never completely avoid the eyesore that is the Minnesota Vikings logo.
Fine. I'm being a hater. I can own it. Because of the Vikings (the football team, not the explorers), I have an aversion to the color combination of deep purple and bright yellow.
But I really shouldn't. Used correctly (not on a Vikings jersey), purple and yellow are amazing together.
Purple and yellow can be difficult to dye on the same skein of yarn. When mixed together in a transparent medium like dyes or watercolor paints, purple and yellow make a really ugly gray-brown. So unless that's your intention, you have to keep these colors from blending. That's part of engineering a colorway. If I want to use purple and yellow together, I need to keep them apart or add additional colors.
Yellow makes purple richer, and purple makes yellow even cheerier. Used alone, purple has a serious, mysterious, noble feel. But in conjunction with a spot of yellow, the mood becomes happier, livelier, and hipper. (Please bear in mind that I'm not making a value judgment about whether purple alone is better than purple and yellow together. These are just tools to help you make decisions for yourself.)
High contrast color combinations are often found in flowers, and some botanists feel this is to make it easier for flowers to be pollinated by birds and insects, and thus a way for them to reproduce.
I want you to especially look at this last example. The petals of this pansy are such a dark purple that they're almost black. Amazing. But what makes the flower -- what helps you see the true shade of the petals -- is that tiny bit of yellow in the center.
By comparison, here is the same picture, except I've Photoshopped out the yellow in the center.
Side by side:
What does this mean for your knitting, your clothing, your home? Here are my rules for using purple and yellow together:
1. A little goes a long way. Choose to focus on either the purple or the yellow, and accent it with the opposite color. Much like fashion magazines tell you to pick a feature to focus on -- your eyes or your lips -- but to walk around with a crazy amount of makeup all of your face can be a bit...let's go with...garish.
2. Use colors of varying saturations (or intensities). If you use a lot of dark purple and a lot of bright yellow, you're going to end up with a Minnesota Vikings sweater. Try pairing intense purple with a buttercream yellow. Or mimosa yellow with a lighter magenta. The brighter the accent color, the less you need to use of it.
3. Use clear hues with dirty ones. A clear hue is one in which little to no black (or brown) is added. On this color wheel, the colors on the outside of the wheel have more gray and brown added -- they're dirty. The colors in the middle have more white added, and the clearest colors on this wheel are on the 5th ring in from the edge.
Choose a bright lemon yellow and a red-violet with a bit of brown added. Or a smoky lavender with a spring yellow-green.
Here are some other palette ideas for you:
Source: sikamo.com via Yarnista on Pinterest
Source: layoutsparks.com via Yarnista on Pinterest
Source: google.com via Yarnista on Pinterest
Source: polyvore.com via Yarnista on Pinterest
Does using purple and yellow together mean that you need to go home and paint your living room magenta and get yellow drapes? Of course not. Use them in measured doses based on your preferences. I love the way the bright shades work with the gray sofa here:
Source: google.com via Yarnista on Pinterest
And how they pair with brown here:
Source: google.com via Yarnista on Pinterest
Here are some knitting ideas for you, too:
I would love to see a sweater knit from a deep purple, like Enna:
With just one hint of bright yellow, like the edging on a button band.
To give you some further inspiration, I've created a Pinterest board dedicated to purple and yellow. You don't need a Pinterest account to see it, so click here to view. If you'd like an invitation to join, use the contact button in the upper right, include your email address, and I'll send one over.
Feel free to leave questions and comments on the items I've pinned (or here on the blog), and I'll be sure to answer.
So, to recap:
1. Football is the axis of evil.
2. Small amounts of a complementary color richen any palette.
3. Don't feel that you need to surround yourself entirely in complementary colors. Adding pops of purple and yellow to neutrals gives a similar effect without the Minnesota Vikings references.
4. Life is too short to knit with beige yarn.
Perhaps I drank too much Hatorade this morning, and need to back off on the Vikings. So long as you follow the purple and yellow rules, and don't try to knit yourself a jersey, I'll be happy.
Reader Comments (31)
1. Purple and yellow is my absolute favorite color combination (2nd favorite: blue and yellow. And I don't like much yellow alone.)
2. Pansies are my absolute favorite flower. I'll take a pot of pansies over roses any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Any pansies, but especially the purple and yellow ones.
3. I hate the Minnosota Vikings too (except Donovan McNabb. I know--you don't know who he is. 'S'ok).
Hopefully 1 - 3 will mean that despite the fact that I spend entire Sundays on the couch watching nothing but football with the passion of a true fan, we can still be friends...especially if I'm knitting. With yellow and purple yarn.
This is AWESOME! The pinterest board really opens up a lot of possibilities, seeing how many ways there are to pair purple and yellow without being a Vikings logo.
We can absolutely still be friends, Jen. My own sister just sent me a picture of herself wearing a Vikings T-shirt in response to this post. ;)
Never commented on your posts before, but wowie, I loved this. The Vikings color combo sets my teeth on edge. Your color inspirations, on the other hand, evoke a happy little high. That brown wallpaper room? Want.
Now what can you do for the Packers, please? (love the team. colors, not so much.)
I'm not really a football fan, either. I live in the land of the New England Patriots though, so I hear about it a whole lot. And Hubby is an Eagles fan. (green and white, not bad.) What is really big in my house though is not football, but hockey. And the Flyers' colors, orange and black, well, all I can think of whenever I see it is "halloween." I wish that weren't so. But it is.
Your father and spouse? Do you also dislike the word "husband," along with the Vikes? :)
I love the info you give and the photos really help too.
Love from your female parent.
I am soooooo with you on the football sentiments. In my house the saying is, "foozeball is the debil," ( it's a quote form the movie Waterboy). I live in the land of the Ravens. Purple is one of my favorite colors and I adore purple and yellow together... but not so much on a football jersey. But you know what is soooooooo much worse? Bright purple and bright red together. Bleh. It gives me the shudders just thinking about it.
No, husband is fine. I just like to change it up.
Love,
Eldest offspring
Purple and yellow yarn brought me to you - hence my Rav name! I bought some Guinevere on Galenas merino from a destash on another online forum, and I fell in love. I had never felt such amazingly soft wonderful yarn, and the purple and yellow together made me so incredibly happy! I never realized it must have been a tricky colorway to dye, such clear colors right up against each other.
I used it for the first tiny baby sweater I made my youngest, the one who just started kindergarten.... *sniff* Now it is tucked away, in hopes that someday, a tiny grandbaby might wear it. ;)
PS @Heather - I just bought some incredibly gorgeous one-of-a-kind yarns Sharon dyed bright red and bright purple; this woman can make any color combo look fantastic, I tell you! :D (Yewberry is the colorway, if you want to search it on Ravelry.)
I didn't know that's where the name Guinevere came from -- that's awesome!
@Guinevere- I should probably clarify that it's a particular shade combo of purple and red that doesn't work well together- like a Ravens jersey with red pants kinda deal. Bleh. Yewberry is altogether different and beautiful! :)
Football? What's that? The name of some exotic plant that I haven't gotten to in the yard yet? What is this football of which you speak?
Yes, yes it is. It has purple and yellow flowers.
I'm enjoying this series. I'm much too "matchy matchy" and it's good to learn about colors!
Dear Yarnista's Female Parent: I so see where your daughter gets her sense of humor. :-)
Sharon, I really think the NFL ought to hire you as a color consultant. You wouldn't have to actually WATCH football, just help the teams with their uniforms. I would love you forever if you could help the Redskins lose the maroon and bright mustard, but more so if you could convince the Seahawks (favorite team of my husband (aka spouse)) to ditch that eyebleed inducing green they've recently adopted.
I was cruising along through your blog--enjoying it because I love the way you write, and the way you think--going hm, mm-hm, OK, interesting. . . and then, and then!
I hit the deep purple pansy with the tiny yellow eye and I saw exactly where you were going! InCREDible!
Gotta go, have to decide which of your yarns I need to order in that fabulous Enna colorway - not for a sweater, I think. Maybe for a baby blanket? And some bright, buttery yellow yarn for booties to go with it?
Or--oh, wow, a Baby Surprise Jacket!
(Oh, lordy, I think I'm hooked.)
Awesome!
There is no football in our house - you an come knit here :D
Pansies are my fave flower in the whole world (hence me owning several bases of yarn spot pansy, lol).
And I'll even knit yellow with my purple if you come knit at my house (and that should tell you how special you are...considering it's yellow ;0) ) LOL
I thought Meatloaf was the axis of evil....?
See, I think I'm gong to elevate football to the true axis of evil. I don't have to look at pictures of meatloaf everywhere I go. Meatloaf is not on my TV 24 hours a day. No one is late to Thanksgiving dinner because of the meatloaf.
Meatloaf getting a reprieve? What is the world coming to?
I love your post...Thank you!!
Beth