Socks: June 2004 Archives

Can A Girl Ever Have Enough Stripey Socks?

I worked on the second sock of this pair during most of my trip to San Francisco (I'll talk more about my trip to the west coast tomorrow, when I can take some better daylight pictures of the goodies I brought back -- we got in after midnight last night and I had an 8:30 phone conference this morning). Almost everywhere I went someone told me "those colors are so neat". Indeed, I am quite taken with the colors as well, even though none of these colors are really in my normal clothing color palette.

Recently I bought a book that I absolutely love -- colorWorks: the crafter's guide to color by Deb Menz (published by Interweave Press). I bought the book because I've been trying to understand more about color and about putting colors together. I like this book for several reasons. One, Deb Menz has a very pleasant, encouraging style that makes you want to get out there and play with color. Two, there are samples of color work in a variety of different craft media so that in addition to color, you can also see how reflectivity and texture affect the overall composition. Three, the explanations are informative and interesting without being pedantic. I'm trying to absorb and think about things as I proceed, so I am slowly but surely working my way through the book, but what I've learned so far has definitely helped me appreciate why the colors in these socks have so much appeal.

To explain, you first need to see a color wheel (I like this link because it allows you to play with tinting and shading as well as just showing you what goes where. For a more conventional picture with some additional discussion about color theory, click here). Color wheels are based on the principle that there are three primary colors (red, blue and yellow) and that all other colors are composed of blends of those three. Thus, if you thing of the color weel as a clock, blue might be at 12, yellow at 4 and red at 8. All the shades between blue and red, for instance, are blends of the two colors, with the spectrum being more red near the red "pole" and more blue near the blue "pole".

There are a variety of ways to come up with harmonious color combinations, and most of them are dependent on where colors are located relative to each other on the color wheel, (the depth of color also plays a role -- and colors arranged by color depth are referred to as "keys"). Color sets that go together are called "harmonies". Complementary colors sit opposite each other on the wheel. None of these colors are quite opposites. However, there is a something called a "split complementary harmony" which is a harmony that includes colors from three hue families. In this case, the orange, purply blue and blue, form such a harmony (in this case, the lighter blue falls in the blue role, but the shade of the blue has been modified by tinting the blue with white).

But what about the green? So far, I haven't been able to find a good explanation for why that green seems to work so well. Perhaps it is because, with the blue and orange, it is three quarters of a square tetrad harmony? (two pairs of opposites such that each color is equi-distant from the next) I am not sure. It is something that I will have to continue to explore as I read her book and as I go off and experiment with color on my own.

Deb Menz advocates playing with color and using these theories as jumping off points for exploration. The book comes with a color wheel and a set of cards to help isolate the colors from the different harmonies as wheel as a group of cards that explore tint and shading. The book provides the tools to test the theories and encourages the reader to experiment and get comfortable with thinking about color and the different components that make a color what it is. Which adds to the feeling that color is an interactive, not just spectator, sport.

Watch out future sweaters...