Outside of innumerable sweaters, historically I’ve not made many of my own clothes. When it comes to the sewing machine I much prefer the complications of quilt shapes (flat) to those of tailoring to the body (so many curves, and so many ways for things to go wrong).
But recently this fact is shifting. The list of color obsessions begun last year has both held true and expanded; and their pull has only gotten stronger, their hooks in deeper. It no longer feels like enough to put these colors into quilt tops, to leave them at the end of the studio day there on the wall. I have been finding myself staring into my closet in the mornings, at my options — black, and black, and black — and feeling immeasurable discontent.
The perfect in-between yellow-green.
Forsythia in the springtime.
I loved this color combination so much it stopped me in my tracks.
The last piece of the M&M linen I fell in love with years ago. In the evening studio light.
I had originally planned today to write about vermillion — about how what began as an obsession with a scrap of fabric became a love affair with a color, and then with the symbolisms of such a color, and the feelings of wearing such a color. My love affair with vermillion illuminated facets of my life I would have thought it impossible for such a seeming inconsequential thing — a perception of certain wavelengths of light? — to have an effect on. I wish to document, more fully, more extensively, the experience of this catalyst.
But the intricacies of misogyny, aging, confidence, sociotropy — these things, it turns out, may take me more time to expand upon in any intelligible way. So in lieu of that more complicated ball of string, the marker I am placing in time this week is instead this simple photo essay: Yellow.
A sweater for wearing with the neon yellow plaid skirt. Obviously.
Yellow is the world I have been living in recently; yellow is first up in the outfit planning total-wardrobe overhaul I am playfully (and also seriously) dubbing: Monochrome Neon Clown. Here’s to the end of what amounts to 25 years of neutral colored clothing. Here’s to the daffodils.
Here’s to change, life’s only constant.