Combining colours

When I was a young person, I once bleached my hair all over with Sun-In, decided it didn’t look dramatic enough, and put henna on top of it. This was in the days when if you wanted highlights you had to sit with a rubber bathing cap with holes in on your head while the hairdresser pulled sections through with a crochet hook and asked you what you thought about Bros’s latest single, so although it seems an eccentric decision in retrospect, you have to see it in context. Anyway, predictably my hair went completely orange, at school they called me Cheesy Wotsit, and it was all very difficult. However, I discovered something interesting: I discovered that there are some weather/ atmospheric conditions where the light is cold and clear, and colours look more intense, as these were the days when people stared at me (most) in the street. It was this kind of light when I walked home from the station the other evening, and it made me think about colours and how to combine them.

Pictures on a wall in Howies. I take photos in shops just like a secret Ninja

I love combining colours: it’s my favourite thing to do with fabric and yarn. I am a bit of a one-trick pony, though. I have certain combinations I like. I like rainbow sequences, and I like colours that are opposite on the colour wheel (e.g. purple and yellow, blue and orange), or very close together (red and pink). My favourite, though, is any combination of intense colours. I like colours which have an intensity that you don’t really find in nature: I am not a fan of the muted colourscheme.

Clock just behind Regent Street helpfully illustrating generic 'multicolour' although I do spy a bit of ecru

What I always find is that if you match intensities, you can use any combination of colours, and it will look alright. For instance, if you are one of those mad people who likes pastels, you can make a quilt using entirely pastel prints and it will look fine (I mean, it won’t, because it’s pastel. But from a coldly aesthetic point of view it will). If you are knitting something which needs a lot of colours, if you use yarn all from the same range, it doesn’t matter, in a way, what you pick, because generally they will have depth of tone/ presence of darker tones in common and this will make your finished object look coherent. The danger is that it might also look a little corporate (or, polished, depending on what you’re aiming at!).

A nice bit of bright blue in a slightly dull street

It is not just about saturation of colour, it is about shininess as well. Partner is very, very colour blind, and one of the things that throws him is when a surface is shiny: if it is shiny, he can’t tell what colour it is. This is something that becomes an issue if you are mixing fabrics, for example I often mix quilting cotton (matt) with silk (saturated and shiny). Here I find it difficult to visually integrate this car into a colour scheme although the dullness of the rest of it all tones together (I mean, you may not like brick red and grey, but it tones!).

Giant plug in Soho. This is Art and therefore is not Functional

I’m trying to experiment a bit more with the ways I combine colours, and one of the combinations I like is a very intense, almost neon colour with a natural, especially grey. I worry I make all my colour (and possibly indeed life) choices on the basis of ironic juxtaposition but hey, if we don’t have irony, what do we have.

I actually think they're starting to take over because there are no natural predators. I may write to the Cambridge Evening News. Look how it's eyeing up the cyclist, this picture is Cambridge in a nutshell, it just needs someone complaining about parking or how their green bin isn't emptied often enough

I find black very difficult to integrate into colour schemes – it always looks jarring to me. It’s not a colour I ever wear, either (although I often admire it on other people). I wonder how much our choice of favourite colours is influenced by what suits our skin tone (because if I wear black without a faceful of makeup I look as if I’ve been exhumed). I’m going to have some rainbow colours left over from the Epic Rainbow Throw (update tomorrow! Put it in your diaries!), and I’m thinking of making granny squares and joining them with black, I will see if I’m brave enough. Mum has seen a throw with these colours in the window of the Clay Cross Wool Shop and says it looks very nice.

I hope this is painted with Farrow and Ball, because if not this homeowner might be drummed out of Cambridge

I love black with yellow and silver here, though. I imagine wasps would agree with me.

This fabric was £165 a metre. Think how much wedding dresses cost though before you hyperventilate. I wasn't looking for a wedding dress (my family read this so I have to clarify in case I start rumours), Partner and I are going to continue our life of Sin

I think your perception of colours is really affected by the memories/ associations they have for you. For instance, even if pink and grey became devastatingly fashionable tomorrow and everyone was wandering about wearing it in wonderfully tasteful Miu Miu prints, it would still scream ‘cheap eighties curtain material for adolescent boys’ to me. Likewise brown, orange and cream is forever Seventies, and I cannot do combinations of cream, white, beige or ecru because I lived through the nineties where all the focus was on Naturals and if anyone had worn turquoise in public it would probably have made the national news. Oh God, that was a difficult decade for those of us who Do Not Get minimalism.

What colours are your go-to combinations? Do you ever get the urge to break out?