Ultra Violet inspiration

January is the month of resolutions, the time when we think about what we'd like to achieve during the year, a moment of setting goals and making decisions. Ironically, January is also the month when most of those resolutions sink and disappear into daily routines and scarce willpower.

So it's always welcome to see some guides like the Pantone Color of the Year which can ease the decision of choosing colors for any project whatever is that you've decided to take up in 2018.

This year's color is Ultra Violet, a rich, complex, provocative shade that suggests the mysteries of the cosmos, symbolizes counterculture, unconventionality, and artistic brilliance, and that has been long related to the mystical world.

I will be honest. I hate purple. I hate violet. Both sit on my top 1 most hated colors (followed by red and green). But after writing Colour Confident Stitching I realized it wasn't healthy to hate a color (though “dislike” might be a more appropriate word in this context).

So since last year, in an effort to become more flexible and grow my usual color register, I've been seriously flirting with purple and violet in the hope of introducing them into my life.

Blue is my favorite color so I felt it'd be easier to approach violet if I stayed closer to the cooler side of the color wheel. And to make things even more enticing I started my exploration by smashing blueberries on cotton muslin fabric (so fun to do!). I obtained watercolor-like stains which displayed a beautiful and subtle array of violet intensities. Then I translated these into embroidery floss colors; I used my DMC color card and selected those that better matched the stains.

Time to embroider! I stitched these woven circles so I had lots (lots!) of hours of color contemplation which proved to be a good exercise to learn to see the beauty of violet.

Then, during last spring, I saw wisteria blossoms as a new lesson is violet-ism. I gathered a bunch of flowers and brought them to my studio to look at them in detail and extract the colors from the petals (using the DMC color card).

I don't know if I've become a violet/purple fan by now. But I'm trying.

Would you like to try Ultra Violet yourself? You can use embroidery floss in color DMC 333 for the closest match to this year's color.