Forever and ever, I’ve had a hard time picking out my colors for granny squares and stripy projects. It always looked to me like people just threw their scraps together and everything turned our perfect. Trouble is that whenever I did that, it looked positively nasty and I would end up yanking it all out or throwing it all out. Either way, it was a waste of time and/or money.
I was just fussing about this very subject the other day to my daughter, and she said, “Ok, look,” as she took a rainbow of primary colored yarn off my shelf, “these are the basic colors…right?”
“Right,” I said.
“They go well together.”
She set them down and picked up a pile of pastels and said, “Basically the same colors, only they’ve added white to them to make them softer and lighter. Do you see that?”
“Ummmm, yeah. I think I do, ” I said.
“They go well together,” she said.
Then she picked through my beloved Caron stash and chose all of the lovely ones in this basket and said, “Ok, what about these? What can you tell about them?”
Yikes. I hate pop quizzes.
“Well,” I said, “they are…darker. But just a little.”
“Ok, mom, if you were a painter, what would you add to make your primary colors just a bit darker?”
“Mmmmmm,” thinking, thinking, wishing I had taken a painting class in my entire life, thinking, thinking, “…maybe…black? But just a speck.”
“RIGHT!!” she hollered. “And THEY go well together. See, mom, it’s not that hard. You can totally do this!”
And without further adieu–
I did.
