Sunday, June 11, 2006

Colors of the Rainbow


Colors of the Rainbow

I am seriously into color, specifically in the form of tie-dye. The brighter the better. I make my own tie-dye shirts, and bags, and scarves, and socks, and... you get the idea. White cotton articles don't stay white very long at my house.

I wear a lot of my own tie-dye work. So does the rest of my family. I wear tie-dye most days. If I'm not wearing tie-dye my friends wonder if I'm feeling really down, or what the special occasion might be.

I get weird looks and snide remarks all the time: "Hey, did you get lost in the Sixties? Cool, man, totally psychadelic!" But it's not that. I love color. I love squirting the dyes onto the white fabrics and watching the colors bleed together. I love rinsing out the clothes in the sink after the dyes have been on overnight because I love watching the colors flow in parallel multicolored streams down the drain. I can do these things for hours; I get a great feeling of "flow" and tranquility this way.

And then! The excitement of opening up the shirts after dyeing to see how they came out! My tie-dye never comes out the way I expect it to, and that's a lot of the fun. Depending on just how the dye penetrated the fabric, the colors come out in a myriad of patterns, separated by white, or blended together, or bleeding different colors than the dye I started with. My purple dye always bleeds blue around the edges; I use that knowledge to achieve special effects.

I love to wear serious color, as well, and not just because it's my own work. I like to flatter myself that it suits my personality: It's bright, cheerful, and lights up the room. And it stands out and proclaims that I am an individual. Well, maybe it also proclaims that I'm a nutcase throwback to the Sixties, but I've heard there were many good things about the Sixties...

Sometimes when I'm in a meeting at work, I'll look around me and see everyone else looking dour in black, grey, white, brown, and navy blue. And then I'll look down at my own wearable palette and smile. It's colorful. And it's me.


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4 comments:

an autumn leaf for all seasons said...

Hey...have been meaning to ask you this ever since you started blogging :-)

Whats the 'red' doing in the The quick...? Is your tag line actually 'a little of everything and some more' :-)? Or is because, foxes could be white too and so you dyed it red? ;-)

Sara said...

No, it's just the way I learned the sentence as a kid. There are a few variants. One leaves out "red", another puts "brown" for the fox and skips the "red", and so on. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is the most common version of this pangram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_brown_fox

an autumn leaf for all seasons said...

Is it?! I never knew people added the word 'red' to that sentence, as it is truly redundant -- only makes the pangram longer by 3 letters and adds no aesthetics either! (Though I have heard of 'brown' being interchangeably used between the dog and the fox!)

My all time favourite one is: Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Unknown said...

"TQBFJOTLD" is more popular than "TQRFJOTLBD". However "TQBFJOTLD" is hardly the shortest because it contains redundancies too. For example, using "A" for one of the two "The"s saves another two letters. So it's all down to what's traditionally used.