I keenly feel for my friends back home this week, after our crocus sightings and then when daffodils started popping up in our garden. Living “up north” in the United States can be brutally beautiful. The prospect of several more months of bleak skies and cold temperatures is daunting for many. So I wanted to highlight the color grey in my color inspiration series this week, as an ode to Minnesota’s winters, as it were.
Because we work in a fairly industrial French city, there are a lot of examples of grey brickwork or grey sidewalks as well. For this post, my mind was stuck in Minnesota, so I chose mostly photos from “back home” as examples.
It’s more difficult for me to find examples of grey as an accent color in my photo collection. My eyes naturally get drawn to the brightest in the photos–much like when I wrote about brown here.
I’ve made 10 or 15 blankets with grey as a primary color in them. Grey always seems to set off the colors around it beautifully, like a best friend highlighting your “good bits” and smoothing over your failures for you. But grey as a solid (like the solid grey celtic blanket I made here) is lovely and cosy as well.
I wonder if you can find an instance of grey and focus on it as a beautiful piece of art this week. It might be difficult, but it may also help shift your perspective from “endless winter” to “understated elegance.”