Colors

What are your colors?
This Jewelry Artisans Community Blog Carnival's topic was inspired by two things.
One was the comment of one of our members on an Oldies but Goodies challenge "This challenge has pointed out to me how seldom I use bright colors. That needs to change!".
The other one was that we noticed I had used a lot of blue in 2020 without knowing why.

So this is the topic for today's post:
"How do you choose colors for your jewelry? Do you prefer certain colors, knowingly or unknowingly? Do you like bright or subdued colors?"
The best way to start this was to have a look at my different stashes and to think about in what way I use them - Delicas, seed beads, lampwork, cabochons, and more.

It was interesting. Obviously I am not a very colorful person. Looking down and seeing that I'm dressed in black and grey at the moment, I shouldn't be too surprised about that.
Of course these are only a few examples, but I came to the conclusion that I prefer animals in lampwork beads, subdued colors in cabochons, and only my Delicas and seed beads offer at least a bit of color although I also have a lot of different grey and other neutral tones.
I didn't take a picture, but my other beads - cubes, bugles, daggers, etc. - only confirmed that.
In the last few years I have also not been using my colored wires much except in the yarn baskets (these are just a few of them).

What does that mean? Am I a dull person? I went to my folders with pictures of all of my pieces and found some color after all, but not as much as I had expected to.
A lot of blue, purple, a bit of red here and there, very little yellow, some orange, but all in all my work isn't bursting with color.

So I thought about why that is.

I have a few colorful lampwork beads, but I'm not very good at using them. I have always been drawn to the blue ones which is one of my favorite combinations with silver. So I stopped adding to my lampwork stash except for one or the other animal that I couldn't resist.

I hardly use colored wires anymore after people made some very mean remarks - not to me, but other sellers - about their pieces looking cheap. While I didn't agree, it obviously influenced me more than I even noticed. I'll have to get on that.

My cabochons are usually favorite stones of mine, labradorite, moonstone, jasper ... right, they don't necessarily come in bright colors. Nothing will change here because I'm determined not to buy cabochons on a whim anymore to hide them away with the ones I already have.

Delicas and seed beads, I got colors there. I'm just thinking of my Bollywood bracelets, like this one for example. Oh wait, more blue and purple. What's my problem? ;-)

Ah, but there are others. Take this one, for example.

Seems it's easier for me to use colors with Delicas and seed beads. I think that's why I love Heather's work so much and like to transfer it into beads. Her colors make me happy.

So what's the conclusion?
I like to see colors, but I'm not using them often enough myself.
What do you think, should I change that? Or should I just accept that the colors will come to me if they want to?

If you want to know what the other participants are thinking about colors, check it out here.

My Bijou Life
Jewelry Art by Dawn

More colors (without the Queen this time) and a WIP

Yesterday I told you about my fondness for color variations of the same design.
Today I want to tell you about my love of color in general and chose tourmaline for it. A friend gave me a strand of tourmaline chips and as always I couldn't help being impressed by the many colors. At first look you might think it's just pink and green, but then you look closer and find this for example.

Can you see that not only there is green, blue, pink, yellow, but that two of the chips also show rainbow colors, one has a dark green and a light pink part and one is blue and pink? And this is not even a very good picture.

I fell in love with tourmalines' colors when I was a kid. We had a one volume encyclopedia with very few colored pages that we came back to again and again. The ones we loved most were the two with flags of the world, fish from the deep sea and minerals. These illustrations were no photos, but printed paintings. My favorites were the moon fish, the Kenyan flag and the tourmaline crystal which was half green, half pink which impressed me very much.
I wanted to take a picture of it for this post as I was sure I had bought the old encyclopedia for myself at a flea market, but now I seem to remember it fell apart so badly that it couldn't be repaired.

Instead I took a picture of a WIP, the wire knit rope necklace that I made with the rest of the tourmalines ....

.... and just for fun here's a close up of the "rainbow chip". So small and yet such wealth of colors!

Shadycats and the Queen

You may ask yourself what they have to do with each other. The Shadycats are a HeatherCat design and the Queen, well, is the Queen.
In fact it has to do with color combinations.
In this post I told you that I couldn't resist making several Shadycats. Even after writing the post I kept going. Usually I can't make a design too often too quickly, but in this case I just could have kept making it in more and more colors which really made me wonder.
Finally a thought hit me ... and a memory from my childhood.

When I was a kid, we watched commercials. There were only three TV programs which weren't available around the clock and for the longest time we had black and white TV (yes, I am that old). We guessed commercials - who was the first to recognize the brand before the name was said?
Then we got color TV and I found myself being fascinating with the "hair studio" of a certain brand. Imagine 70s hairdos and customer questions "Since I started using your shampoo for greasy hair, I have dandruff. What should I do?" I still remember that the answer was to use both the shampoo for greasy hair and the one for dandruff. Smart. That way they could sell two products.
What really intrigued me were the colors, though. There was the yellow line for this and the blue line for that, and all the bottles were standing on a table, the shampoo, hairspray, conditioner and I don't know what together. I still get that feeling today when I go grocery shopping and see shampoos in harmony, neatly lined up in their shelves.

Another color lesson came from my stamp collection, though. We all had a "stamp collection" as children. We were not very professional, but there were times when we were at least quite enthusiastic. What's left over from our family collections is in one of my drawers. I gave away some of them here and there, traded for comics, sent some to a friend for her grandson and so on, but she is still there, in lovely colors and in my favorite design ... the Queen. As you can see, I seem to have been especially fond of the Arnold Machin stamp (probably because it was the easiest for me to lay my hands on).
We had stamps with animals on them, colorful flowers, buildings and whatnot, but I loved to look at the Queen in all colors and wished I had even more of them.

That is the same feeling when I look at the Shadycats. I'd like to see them in many more color combinations.
So far there are six and I already feel the temptation coming over me again ....

They are all available in my Zibbet shop except for the blue one which is already sold.