28 January 2011

when the world is puddle-wonderful

A confession, of sorts: I am not good at joining things.

Clubs. 'Online communities.' Read-along, knit-along, sew-along, et-cetera-alongs. Even alumni associations are challenging, and I've already done the hard work with those.

So I have no idea why the Colette Patterns Spring Palette Challenge intrigues me as much as it does ... but, it does. Can I blame it on it being the snowy depths of January and the idea of pretty spring dresses seems incredibly appealing?

I have no idea if I'll be able to meet the deadlines for the challenge (I think I'm already behind). But for what it's worth, if I were going to be Mme Organised and sew a spring wardrobe, this is the palette I'd use:

Spring_Challenge
Color by COLOURlovers

Robin's egg blue1, celery green, ivory, dove grey

And hey, I even have a length of beautiful robin's egg blue linen with ivory embroidery, and a nice piece of ivory silk noile. Next step, matching them to patterns.

In Britain, this colour is more commonly called duck's egg blue -- the British robin is a different bird from the American one and does not lay bright blue eggs. Mallard ducks, which are as common in Britain as they are in North America, lay greenish blue eggs, and I think that is the origin of the 'duck's egg' name. Robin's egg is brighter and bluer to my eye, while duck's egg is greener and greyer, but it's a matter of degrees. Either way, it's one of my favourite non-grey colours.

Edit in response to Charlotte's question about sage green and various eggs: The generally accepted designations seem to be these:

robin's egg blue:    

light robin's egg blue:    

duck's egg blue:    

sage green:    

e.e. cummings

2 comments:

  1. I wonder if ducks' egg blue is more like our sage green?

    This is a great palette, Nora--it looks so fresh and cool.

    I'm not a joiner either, so I know what you're talking about. It's hard to stay involved. We're such rugged individualists...

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, as far as I could tell, sage green was sage green. "Duck's egg" is bluer than sage and was always applied to things I would have called "robin's egg" myself.

    I'll see if I can't dig up some of our friendly hex codes to show the difference.

    ReplyDelete

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