Saturday, September 1, 2012

End of Summer Tapestry Diary

Saying farewell to summer this Labor Day Weekend, which coincides with the first day of September. That means a new month and a new color for the 2012 Tapestry Diary. I'm excited because it's my favorite color, BLUE!!!

July was red, and, as in May, I was still dividing my parallelograms into smaller triangles, and blending the red with grays and blacks and whites, although not so much white. Of course I had to weave a little flag on July 4th. It was always a special day for me, growing up overseas, a day when we celebrated all things American: hot dogs, baseball, and our old, faded flag.

I knew that August would be yellow, but little did I know the challenges of yellow.....a very tricky color. Blending yarn is different from blending paint, but you can't just take yellow yarn and blend it with gray and have a nice gray with yellow speckles (the way you can do with red). No, the yellow might decide to sneak off and hide, turning the gray into a strange shade of greenish something....

I also discovered that the pure yellows shouted too loudly next to the dark reds that were blended with gray and black, so I had to wait a bit, and introduce them later when they were surrounded by some quieter yellow blends.


In my yellow August, I decided to divide my parallelograms into curvy shapes instead of triangles, and they definitely move a lot more than the triangles. I don't know if I was thinking of the beach, and waves; maybe so, or maybe it's just an expression of all the nature I've been exploring on Cape Cod this August.


Here's a sunset photo, which inspired me to create a whole new blog, Wonders of Nature, just for my nature photos. I've been unable to resist all the sunsets and low tides and and and.......

Don't forget you can click on any image to see a larger version.  See the May Diary post for links to previous tapestry diary posts.

2 comments:

K Spoering said...

Jan, I love the yellow with the greys!

I am curious to know why September will be blue? I know you see numbers and letters as colors, and I see months in color. To me, September is gold or orange - probably because it is the start of fall here. My August tapestry is mostly blue. Do you have a reason for a blue September, or are you using your favorite color for a favorite month?

Jan said...

Hi Kathy, I just realized from your comment that I always like yellow with gray! But blending the 2 colors was a bit tricky.

So for me, I think the main reason months have colors is because letters and numbers have colors. Some more strongly than others. One of the strongest letter colors is that S is blue, and also 5 is blue. Very blue! In my previous tapestry diary I did September as blue and yellow, and that is probably a combination of the letter S being blue, and the association of September being a sunny month.

That said, I wondered why August seemed so obviously yellow until I wove the number for the month and realized that 8 is yellow.

I think that whatever synesthetic associations I have between letters/numbers and colors, have been influenced over the years by other things like weather, or birthstones or who knows what else. Actually I had a color by number coloring book when I was 6 and lots of those associations got stuck.