KCBW2012: Colour lovers

It's already time for the 3rd annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, ladies and gentlemen! Holy crap, did the time fly. I was going to really prepare for this one, then I guess I got distracted by a picture of a monkey on the internet and before I knew it, it was the 23rd of April and Blog Week was a fact.

Oh well. It's a good thing I like winging it. Brings out the inspiration.

Today's topic is 'Colour lovers'. Here's the explanation as given by the lovely host of the Blog Week, Eskimimi:

"Colour Lovers
Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects - do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour."

Let's start this week off with a confession. I don't have an actual 'stash' as most fiber-y crafters will have. It's shocking, isn't it? I don't buy yarn that often, and when I do, I buy enough for the project I'm working on and nothing more. The truth is, I don't have the space! We've been meaning to do some heavy remodelling of the closet in the study so we do have more shelf space, but until then, my stash is crammed in a tiny space. Most of my stash is the leftovers I inherited from my grandmother, the rest is mostly odd balls from a tiny euro-shop around the corner that sells discontinued yarns for 50 cents a ball. Now, mind you, I did pick up the occasional lovely ball of yarn there. And most of the yarn I have bought... Well, there was a very distinct similarity.

Let me show you some of my handmades that have seen a lot of use in the past year.

Nah, that must be a coincide...

Oh.

Yes, my favourite colour is blue. How did you guess?! I love combining it with grey, but that's because I love stripes and any bright colour goes well with grey. I'm a process crocheter more than an object-crocheter, so I pay little attention to things like colours in patterns. Most of the time, I simply grab something from my stash and start hooking, sometimes even without a pattern. The gloves and hat were made without a pattern. The shawl was an Elise-shawl and, let's be honest, the faded, whispy purple-y pink of the shawl as pictured in the pattern doesn't exactly look appealing. But I had the blue cotton in my stash, and this looked like a pretty pattern, and the rest is history.

My blue-crush has gotten so bad that I was packing my bag for a week's holiday and only noticed that all my shirts were either blue or a blue-ish green when I had to unpack and re-pack because it didn't fit in my backpack. I didn't even notice!

I try using more colours than just the blues from my stash, but it's hard. I'm currently working on a stash-busting pillowcase in red, salmon, mint and two hues of blue and I am already lamenting the fact that I'm running out of one of the blues, while the mint, red and pink skeins don't seem to get smaller at all. If I had to set myself a goal this year, and trust me, there's numerous goals to choose from, it would be to work with more colours than just the blues. I have some really nice yarn in my stash: a skein of chunky mustard yellow yarn and a skein of purple and lavender yarn and some weird red yarns...

Or I could just go yarn-shopping. Yeah. I should go yarn-shopping. See, Blog Week, what you're doing to me? One day in and already I've got yarn-shopping on the brain! This is going to be one hell of a week, ladies and gents.