The cell phone rang when I was on my way to the grocery store around 7:30 yesterday evening. I was desperately hungry and looking for something fast to make. I had planned to make pasta with a red lentil sauce, but it takes almost an hour to cook and there was no way I was going to last that long. Hungry and in a hurry, I plugged in my little hands-free earbud. It was a prerecorded message from my boss telling me that I had just one more week of vacation left...a 7:30 AM meeting...check my school e-mail for a detailed attachment. Buzzkill is the expression that comes to mind. Not that I haven't already been to school for a meeting (two of my six person department are brand spanking new teachers this year so we are being proactive in our support) and spent countless hours thinking about what I want to do the first weeks of school (I have a new course load this year - six classes of Spanish 2 - ¡yeah, one prep! But how do I keep it fresh all day).
Color inventory 2: Running hot & cold
In honor of that phone call, my subconscious woke me at school day time: 5 AM. Boy, the little dogs were surprised that they didn't need to whine to get me up this morning. While waiting for the coffee to brew, I walked around the house and took pics for my color & pattern inspiration of the day. Actually, I'm not trying to inspire myself so much as understand how to put together colors. I'm a little all over the place - I like brights, hots, cools, earthtones, just about everything. I look around at many sites and see so many great combos in beads and stringing, but my difficulty results in something like excitement, then frustration, then disappointment when I start rifling through the bead stash. So I'm working on this. Either that or I have discovered and justified a fantastic new procrastination tool. One of my friends calls this method the paralysis of analysis. I am greatly inspired by La Bella Joya's exploration of Margie Deeb's The Beader's Color Palette. But I'm not ready (in my mind) to put the beads together yet. I guess I'm taking a color inventory.
One of the things that got me started thinking about this was a quick glance through my Etsy favorites. I noticed that there were little clusters of colors within all those fab pieces I was hearting. Then I looked at the sacred bead stash. It didn't really match. Just as I have been battling with clothing and making outfits, I need to learn how to use neutrals (and what defines a neutral seems to be situation dependent) to show off splashes of color.
Russian leaf color inspiration
Yesterday I posted this Russian leaf earring. I had in my mind a more reddish brown - this one goes green (sort of baby poop green) and I actually have a much better brown in Delicas, but I was on a kick to see what the pattern would look like with round 11/0 and didn't follow what I knew I should be doing. I wonder what better pairings there might be for color. I'm going to use my color inspiration from a few days ago to get to the bottom of this.
Dog shot of the day. From a FLA corgi party. Not my photo.