Colour Walk

In All Stitched Up! issue #297 we unpacked the idea of finding hidden joy in the world around us and how, once we become attuned to the idea, we’ll begin spotting little moments of joy everywhere we go.

And do you know what? We absolutely have!

After looking further into the work of Ingrid Fetell Lee, we came across another idea she shared that was inspired by the work of Leah Rosenberg – a colour walk. Put simply, the notion of a colour walk is that before going for a walk we should pick a colour and keep an eye out for it as we walk.

Whilst Leah Rosenberg’s book that prompted Ingrid’s idea, ‘The Color Collector’s Handbook: A Journal for Discovering the Colors in Your Everyday’, contains 100 unique shades of colour that take the reader on a scavenger hunt as they notice, name and record the colours they find in the world around them that match those hues contained within the book, we couldn’t help but bring needle and thread to the idea!

It’s been impossible not to notice the delicate pink blossom now adorning many of the trees and the vivid yellow of the golden wattle that is now in full bloom as winter begins to give way to spring in the Southern Hemisphere and do you know what we instantly found ourselves thinking of?

DMC 604 and DMC 307!

It turns out that our minds are so accustomed to thinking in thread colours, that we instantly translated the colours we saw on our walk to those found on the DMC, Au Ver à Soie and numerous other thread charts it seems we have committed to memory. Whilst our colour walk was somewhat backwards compared to Leah’s as we saw the colours and then matched them to the hue of a thread, we could just as easily have done it the other way around and selected a DMC colour before embarking on the walk to see how many things we found that matched that colour.

It is such a simple idea, but as Ingrid so eloquently stated, ‘I’m always amazed by what we can discover even along our most well-worn paths once we tune in to joy.’

We hope we’ll always be amazed by the colour and joy we find in the world around us, even on the most familiar paths.