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Good Sunday: Color

I love color, especially when it shows up in yarn.  I’ve been crocheting whenever I’ve gotten tense lately, deconstructing multicolored skeins just to see what happens.  And then there are paintings from artists who explore color, which I am fixated on right now because I’m living in an apartment that is all beige.  The bathroom has no windows, so I decided to give it some, a huge poster from  on the back wall, a Van Gogh (not Starry Night) by the sink, a Grant Wood over the towel bar, and my fave, Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus over the shower.  Color is my good thing for the week, and forever, too.

What’s your good thing for the week?

67 Responses

  1. Colour is life! One of my room’s walls, the one I’m seeing when I look up from the computer, is a bright spring green. Makes me feel good every time.

    Good Sunday is a good thing – I usually fixate on the not-so-good stuff, but actually, just having a couple of sunny days in a row, having kids who actually still want to spend time with their parents, a visit to the big garden center we haven’t been to in ages – a riot of colour, of opportunities, flowers – good moments.

  2. I love color – sometimes bright, sometimes muted, but all flowing together. My girfriends think I have a particular fondness for teal, at least when I make quilts, so it is a surprise to them when I turned up with a red / black quilt top. And I too love yarn in color. I bought a bunch so I could whip up baby blankets when I don’t have any other projects, and they will be bright and colorful!

    Speaking of red quilts, my good thing was to pack up and ship my great-niece’s giant red quilt to her. She should get it Thursday, if all goes well. I’m still internally debating whether the neighbor kid should get one of the others. His older brother graduated a couple of years ago and I did nothing. But the following year, I made a quilt for my next-door neighbor’s child’s graduation. I had more interactions with Alex (and Alex’s family) than with Brady. But now there’s the middle child – who waves at me when he sees me. I’m leaning toward yes, give it to him but I don’t know if I should actually ask him if he wants one.

    1. My grandma made quilts for all the grandchildren’s 16th birthday. We got to choose the color scheme and pattern. It was such a special gift. I finally had to stop using it a couple years ago (many years after my 16th birthday) because it was getting worn out and I didn’t want to ruin it completely. I say go for the gifting.

  3. Nancy — My gut reaction is that he would love a quilt, but might say “No,” if asked. Especially because he’s a boy.

    I’ve enjoyed an extended birthday week and need to diet off all the good times. I want to spend an hour every day in the garden, but didn’t get out there at all last week. Gotta make a new habit.

  4. Three years ago, we moved into a house whose every room was painted the color of a Band-Aid. All the rooms are now some shade of purple, except my computer room, which is peach, and the living room, which I painted off-white to better display a couple of artworks.

    I love my purple kitchen.

    1. I love my purple bedroom. 🙂
      My office has two grey walls, medium-dark, upon which are deployed a total of fifteen pieces of framed art in reds & golds, to go with the three pieces of Asian furniture that are mostly red.
      The downstairs yoga room is painted an intense peacock blue.

      There’s a big space in this house where painting the walls (currently a noncolor somewhere in the white-beige-pale grey spectrum) is contraindicated because there’s no architectural separation between rooms, so we’re using art instead. I love color.

          1. Ooooh now that’s a bedroom. Purple is my favourite colour. I’ve always been afraid that a bedroom in that colour would be too lurid but you’ve knocked it out of the park. Love it.

          4. . That is gorgeous. I love purple, actually purple and blues. Back a long time ago we could do an entire wash in blues and purple my mother my sister and I.

          6. Makes me miss my old favorite bedroom. I had 3 walls painted lilac & a deep purple rag-rolled on the 4th wall. Gray slate looking floor, white ceiling & purple tapestries for curtains.
            If we ever move maybe I will recreate it.

  5. I used to hang Robert Wood Autumn Landscapes on my walls. Even in college, for the short period when I lived in a dorm.

  6. I’m taking an online self development course for the weekend that I’ve taken before. Many things to reflect on. As part of this, I’ve had conversations with both my brothers who haven’t been talking to each other after a fight in November. They’ve asked me to have a mediated call with them and so this has become preparation. With one of them, we had to talk about an argument we had over 20 years ago that we stuck underneath the carpet until now. All very intense but we’re moving forward. They are both very pessimistic that they can ever have a productive relationship but I’m not pessismistic at all. I don’t think it will be easy, but it’s entirely possible.

  8. Years ago, my husband and I bought a house. Every room had white walls and a white ceiling. We planned to paint many of the rooms other colors.

    Life happened as life does. So far, only one room got painted another color. (We have artwork and family photos up, giving the rooms color. So much easier than painting!)

    We desperately need to gut the kitchen. Now I’m thinking about painting it purple….

    1. Almost sixty years ago when we first bought our house we took down the wallpaper the two front rooms. One room we replaced with new wallpaper the other the most popular back then (seventies) of the time period with wood paneling. Over time that was changed in both rooms to paint. The paint was of a cream linen neutral color. We talked about bringing color to the rooms after seeing what my son and wife had done to their house. I came home from work one day to find my husband had painted both rooms. By then the second front room had become our new downstairs bedroom. After a while we discovered we didn’t like the colors (beige and blue) and went back to the original neutral. Thinking back keeping them neutral went with the fact I’m a seasonal curtain and drape changer. Now I can’t do that as I’m afraid of falling off the ladder. Because one time I did. So, what is up there is there until I can get the family gophers (go for) to help.

  9. I love color. I used to knit (I made matching sweaters for my kids and some of their cousins, and I have absolutely no idea where I found the time except for long car rides) but when I broke my wrist over 20 years ago I found knitting hurt. It doesn’t now and I would like to get back to it. But somehow between day job and writing calls recommendations for Congress and hosting unknown women and taking to Protective Services and dealing with mom and hips and watching baseball and, and, and, it never happens . Oh yeah and reading.

    I did teach both DD and DS to knit and their knitting so reflects their personalities.

    DD knits little tops for babies and has made me fingerless gloves and never uses a pattern as far as I know. DS knits wonderful warm hats usually in blue and always uses a pattern. It cracks me up. It also reminds me of the time when DD 10 and DS 4 both brought pottery home from school. DD had made a vase or other vertical cylinder with a flat top with a satyr. DS asked us to guess what his thing which seems to have a neck and wings was so we said swan. He was very indignant. It was a sink. They are very different people.

    My house mostly has Navajo white walls with lots of color from folk art and my grandmother’s paintings and a few other oils and the kitchen has blue tiles and a lot of blue plates DH brought home from his travels and the fire place has blue Dutch tiles and the bathrooms are blue. This is because DH is partly color blind and can see blue better than other colors. DD painted her room dark green and I love it.

    I get to play with color in the garden. That’s where I get to be creative. And I’m so happy that not only did I have a lot of spring bulbs come up even though I couldn’t plant my tulips and crocuses last fall, but also a lot of dianthus which I thought was an annual is blooming. Also our roses. And yesterday I bought impatiens and Torenia and Angelonia and Lantana and will start to plant it while we wait for our house guest. I feel very restrained. I bought maybe half what I usually do (because hip is still healing.) I also bought one salvia as a test case because I now appreciate the virtues of perennials. I don’t let DH buy flowers for the garden. He will come back with really jarring colors (see color blindness).

    1. On reading over what I wrote I realized maybe we should check if DS is partially colorblind too. When he was a kid he insisted on a blue bedroom (and then told me to paint clouds! Fortunately I found stick on clouds and and airplane. They periodically fell off which felt vaguely metaphorical.
      ) and as a teen he asked for blue again. His grad school dorm accessories are blue. I thought we did one of those color blindness tests for him but maybe we didn’t.

      1. He says he has taken several and is not color blind. He just loves blue.

        Also for those who are curious I posted the latest update on our protective services stuff at very bottom of the last blog. It’s about what might have helped lead to this incident so a little grim. But daughter is in safe place and Protective Services will proceed in court so that’s a huge relief.

      2. Clouds are remarkably easy to paint. I painted my daughter’s room with clouds shaped like bunnys and sea serpents. I think the tool was a wally. Night sky is,pretty easy too.

  10. My good thing for the week would be my second round volunteering at the library. I was told to grab the oldest set of books to reshelve, and yesterday it was full of kids’ books. I haven’t been a visitor to that section of the library since I was a kid, so everything has changed and even at the small library here…multiplied. I had no idea how many actors are also authors of childrens’ books. I had no idea how many sections you could possibly have in that section. 2 hours later, the cart was finally empty.

    Regarding art/color, I used to use the old hautelook dotcom site to get prints all the time. To the point I had too many when I downsized and was handing off art to Goodwill and the local senior facility….heck, I tried to give some to the guys who were finishing the renovations. I have some here at the new place I haven’t put up at all……and still, I’m off to an art show this afternoon and I cannot guarantee I won’t get something else. My newest trick is to *not* hang them, but put them on shelves, on tables. Feels a bit like cheating, but I like having other people’s creativity around.

  11. This afternoon’s good thing: a planned excursion to Flat Rock to see a stage adaptation of ‘Pride & Prejudice.’

    This morning’s good thing: I was looking out a window counting squirrels when some crows kicked up a fuss, the squirrels dashed for cover, and then along came a red fox, clearly annoyed by the crows. I was too excited to dash for my camera, but – yay, fox!

    Yesterday’s good thing: I was a bit stuck on my GeoIV story because I’d realized the old manor house where the main characters will all live could not exist as originally imagined, so I drew it out (two sheets of graph paper and 3 hours of internet research on Jacobean architecture and English manor life), following which I read through the 12 chapters already written and corrected all the house descriptions.

    Also, it got nice and cold last night. Not freezing, but chilly enough to put a fake-fur throw on my bed. For sleeping, I like a chilly room with heaps of covers (so does my cat, she’s on the bed right now preventing me from tidying it).

  13. I love bright colours. Not so much in my house but in my wardrobe, my garden crafting (knitting, card making).

    I transplanted my tomato and pepper seedlings I to individual pots. Way more than I need but I can give extras away. My Black Ruffle tomato seeds did very well and excited to grow them in the garden. First trip to the garden centre and I found purple filet bush bean seeds. Not sure they’ll hold the colour when cooked but they are a gorgeous colour in the photo on the package. I’m going to try growing blueberries in pots this year so bought acidic soil and a couple of low growing blueberry plants. Way too early to plant but they’ll manage outside even in the colder nights. Gardening season is always good.

    1. I grow purple peacock string beans, and they are lovely purple, but do go green when they’re cooked.

    2. I think purple beans must be easier to harvest, but I love the green climbing French bean Cobra for its flavour & reliability, so end up sticking to that.

  14. My good thing is that my garden pond is back up and running for the season. In the fall, my pond guy (what, everyone doesn’t have a pond guy?) comes over to pull the pump and the filter, so they don’t freeze. At some point in the spring, in this case last Friday, he comes and puts them back in, and every other year, empties the pond entirely to clean out the muck that builds up. It’s a hella job, and I spent two hours helping by chasing goldfish and an insane amount of half-grown pollywogs with a net, to put them safely in a container until it was done. It was fun and silly and made me feel like I was six again, although my 66 year old neck and back are Not As Amused. Still, it looks and sounds beautiful again, and it is a little bit of peace in a chaotic world. Here’s my post that shows it off, in case anyone is curious.
    https://www.instagram.com/p/DX4Jz2CAgHb/

    2. ! When we moved into a house in Sherman Oaks, there was a goldfish pond that they had shown us. But when we looked in it after we moved, it was black and we figured all the goldfish had moved out. It turned out it was just dirty and we needed to clean it. Then we found the frogs and quite a large goldfish. Also, we realized there were too many goldfish and that we were very poor landlords so we bought a tank and had goldfish in the house. But I loved that pond.

    3. I love your pond.
      I want to put in a pond near the little hill in our backyard so I can also have a babbling brook.

    4. That is beautiful Deborah – I want to sit by it in the sunshine and listen to it trickle. Thank you for sharing

  15. I love colors because colors unify. I love the colors of my university and the colors of my favorite baseball team. Colors are a good thing.

  16. Color is my good thing too! And timely for this week, because I just started a new bed-sized quilt last night. https://www.instagram.com/p/DX20i85kX7x/ (Note that the background is lighter than it appears; I took the picture last night with poor lighting.) It will feature thirty-plus different blue prints, all with the same background and burgundy paisley accents.

    Also good this week is that the induction-top range of my dreams is finally installed, along with my heat-pump dryer. AND the local power company is offering a $700 credit (total for the two) toward my future bills as a reward for installing efficient appliances. AND I got to kick the horrible gas company to the curb (at least for these two appliances; I’m planning for the furnace replacement, but not this year). AND I’m no longer contributing as much to climate change. (Yes, I know that a lot of electricity is produced by climate-damaging methods, but one step at a time.) Another feel-good project is happening soon too: having three trees planted along the front property line as part of a state beautification & anti-climate-change initiative.

    BTW, if anyone’s thinking about converting from gas and doesn’t know where to start, this is a really useful website: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/ I attended a webinar they put on last week, and while I didn’t learn much I didn’t already knew, it was well done, and it felt good to hear them remind everyone that electrification is inevitable, even if it’s facing some setbacks at the moment.

  17. I love color. I have sun catchers in my best windows and in the evening my kitchen fills up with rainbows. That is my favorite time of day. My dream is to someday have a window filled with shelves of colored glass. Silly husband has made the requirement that we have to leave it so the windows can be opened.

  18. Well colour is what the world is all about, in my opinion. But, I just looked up the “Fall of Icarus” painting and thought, mmh. Then I had another look, and another and oh my! I had to call on wiki to give me the low down, but what a painting, those legs thrashing about in the water are too much. Am I laughing? Am I crying? I need more coffee, and possibly a cookie to deal with all of this on a Sunday morning!

  19. My brother’s coming for a week’s visit, which could be nice. He’s a RN, so it will be good to have someone medical knowledge around my dad for 24/7 for a while. Maybe he can help set up a shower system my dad will accept.
    I have a cyst on my right thumb, which can be quite painful, and makes most things I like or need to do a real drag. I went to the wrong office for my ortho appointment so now I have to wait four weeks for the next appointment.
    Well this is rather gloomy. I’m looking forward to having my big strong gym-rat brother carry heavy things for me, and getting my big garden pots out on to the sunny patio. I’m looking forward to going to the greenhouse and buying outrageously bright flowers for them.

  20. My good thing this week is my first grandchild, Wes, born 8 days ago. My heart is bursting.
    And I’m writing this in my dining room, which is painted Wedgwood blue and cream, to fulfill a teenage daydream.

  21. I like color too. My walls are all white, but my mom was an amateur artist. She painted colorful, semi-abstract flowers, and I have most of her best paintings. I rotate them on my walls. My living room has 10 paintings at the moment, my bedroom 8, and the corridor between them – 9.

  22. Renting generally means beige or off-white. I compensate using quilts on the walls, along with poster-art and groups of smaller art pieces.
    My good Sunday for the week–and longer–was meeting with my brother and his wife for lunch yesterday. It’s the first time we’ve been together since before the pandemic, and we did okay.

  23. When we got married, I moved into my husband’s house which was all beige and tans. I asked “how do you feel about paint?” Not alot got got painted but there was alot of art, quilts, and plants which made a difference. I think bedrooms should be blue and kitchens yellow.

    I brought yarn home from Argentina. Llama in browns and creams, mohair in blues, white and grey and some funky pink colored cotton. Some of the mohair is my friend that knits as payment for creating me stuff. Argentina sells yarn by weight so we had to do mathing.

  24. I used to refuse colour and dress mostly in black, but as I get older, colours sneaks in. Some of my stage clothing for when I’ve been singing has been quite colourful. One of my favourite pieces of clothing currently is “the kitty-skirt”; black skirt with orange and purple cat-head silhuoettes printed all over it. Imagine if they’d been embroidered! Anyway, I love that thing, and last year my sib helped me buy a couple of matching tops, because the ones I had were mostly with prints. I like quirky and whimsical things, it seems.
    I like playing around with colour when I create things, though. My knitted stuffed toys have so far had a bunch of colour: hot red, marbled blues, white with colourful sprinkles. When I imagine the stuffed toys I wanna sew, they’re usually in happy colours and patterns. I’ve made mosaics with colourful pieces, or black or silver with coloured grout. I used to buy these little ceramic moneybanks and decorate with foam clay in vivid colours, but then someone told me that looked faaar too childish for someone around 30, so I stopped. It’s fun to work with colours, but a bit difficult when you can’t see them. 🙂 I have seen colours, so at least I can paint pictures in my mind, yet I’m still a bit anxious about if it’ll turn out right. But, what’s life without taking on challenges!
    My good thing this week is that it’s the kitts’s birthday today!
    https://bsky.app/profile/shass.bsky.social/post/3mkxcdhrzxc2j
    Triple is on my lap now, a bit like in photo 4. She sends you all her love and says that she graciously accepts tuna and treats, should anyone have some to spare. 😉 Thank meow very much!

    3. Please tell the idiot who told you that 30 year olds shouldn’t make “childish” art that, “We do not stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.” I do not remember who is the source of that quote, just that it is very popular in toy stores and children’s book departments. It is one thing if they want to suck the joy out of their own life, just keep their unimaginative mitts off of mine (and, I assume, yours.) Then suggest that they check out some picture books illustrated by the late, great James Marshall. His work continued to be puffy and colorful up until the end of his life. Of the books that he both wrote and illustrated, the most famous are a series about 2 platonic hippopotomi named George and Martha. One collection is called “George and Martha: Tons of Fun.”

    4. Happy birthday for your cats, Shass! I really enjoyed the descriptions of the photos, too – I had never heard of Be My Eyes but those descriptions were really good.

  25. Im still a blue and purple color lover. During Jury Duty I crocheted in this beautiful blue and purple yarn. I ended up with a couple of scarves and hats, and I still have a lot of the yarn. I should go back to it.
    In the morning, I read daily word.
    Heading for today’s was with Joy I dance in the fountain of life. Wishing everybody a joyful dance.

  26. Im still a blue and purple color lover. During Jury Duty I crocheted in this beautiful blue and purple yarn. I ended up with a couple of scarves and hats, and I still have a lot of the yarn. I should go back to it.
    In the morning, I read daily word.
    Heading for today’s was with Joy I dance in the fountain of life. Wishing everybody a joyful dance

  27. I love color, especially in clothing and home decor. As my hair changes from gray to white, I find that the colors I wear are changing, too. My glass frames are Bright Red and when I was trying to decide if I wanted to commit to wearing that every day, I thought that they might clash with my orange sweaters. After about 10 minutes I decided that I didn’t care. Also, as my orange shirts wear out, it has been harder and harder to replace them because orange isn’t “in” this year.

  28. My happies this week were good food things. I also remembered that I used to know how to be professional – working for someone who has become a friend has made me sloppy and too invested. A bit of emotional distance made the week go more smoothly for the most part.

    I admire all ya’all’s actual gardening. I managed to pull some dead hollyhock stems and frighteningly tough grass out of my front flower bed this morning. Everything else is being declared a potential flower and ignored (though I do have to avert my eyes from the creeping Charlie creeping in again after professional weeding last year vanquished it for a while).

  29. It has been over a decade since we moved in to light-sucking mushroom taupe walls. I hate the colour. I still have the main living and dining area to paint. The kitchen was renovated and is white cabinets on BLUE walls and I love it.
    The bathroom is sea glass, and the bedrooms have colour.
    My mom did Robin egg blue and royal silk (which is the only beige I will ever like) downstairs.
    I want to go bold in the living/dining room which is open to the kitchen…

    My good things this week are gardening: pulling dead raspberry canes and planting bulbs; visiting friends and losing track of time; symphony with Mom today, and it’s warm enough to hang my laundry up outside.

  30. I found a paper nautilus shell on the beach! This is one of those things that I have always wanted, and that has never happened. They occasionally wash up on Flinders Island, but hardly ever here in southern Tasmania. This one was half buried in the sand, and it’s so delicate and fragile that I have no idea how it survived. But now it lives on my mantelpiece. https://www.instagram.com/p/DX2fDxRk3vL/?img_index=1

    1. For those who don’t know these beautiful shells, it’s the egg case of an octopus called Argonauta argo. So not a nautilus at all, but the shells look very similar.

  31. I realized last night, that with one wall taken up by mirror in my new bedroom, there will be less room for paintings. The ceilings in the living area are very high so I could get carried away with paintings there. My son took me to choose flooring for the former carpeted area today. He tore the carpet out in an afternoon, and uncovered huge stains from the dog that lived here. I found some laminate that is the shade of sand, and looks like wood, to put in my bedroom, walk-in closet, and hall. The rest of the house is full of dark brown laminate, which I refused to match for the carpet replacement area. There are windows on only two sides of the townhouse, which are East and West, thank goodness.

    The brand new refrigerator stopped working, and the old backup one is also not keeping very cold. They will come and switch out the new appliance tomorrow between 7am and 7pm. Lovely! I just stocked up at Trader Joe’s, and now my DIL will come and get the perishables to put in their backup fridge. I did not buy any frozen stuff, because my son will have to find time to install the microwave.

    Who gets up at 7am when they are retired, and is dressed and happy to see company? Not me.

    I had a dream where I painted one wall of the living room periwinkle, and added two horizontal stripes of turquoise to bracket coral zigzags. I made some candle saucers with that theme when I lived in Tucson. I think I will find some wide cloth in a Navajo theme to cover that mirror, too.

    Color! I love it!!

  32. When I lived in the newest dorm at college, the one wall that wasn’t divided up by windows, closets or book shelves was painted a bright blue, maybe one shade darker than the background on this page. I loved it! It broke up the monotony of all the other white walls and made the whole place seem much less institutional. And because it was only one wall, it could be darkish without swallowing up the light. I’ve always wanted to do that in one of my apartments, but as a renter with no particular painting skills, I didn’t want to have to paint it over when I moved out. One of my neighbors at a previous apartment said that it wouldn’t take much time, but since he was a free lance display designer who painted backgrounds weekly, I’m sure that what seemed like a piece of cake to him would have felt like the whole bakery to me.

  33. The worst fashion period for me was the decade or so when everyone wore black for everything all the time. Because I love color, too. Mostly the cooler blues, purples and pinks.

    I’ve tried to stay away from art shows and antique markets because I have too much stuff and need to just enjoy the things I have.

    Mostly I indulge in new and colorful things in the garden. My good thing this week will be getting to my favorite farm store to pick up flowers for my porch. I can’t wait even though we seem to be having a cold May.

  34. All this talk of purple rooms suggests I should put up my lavender kitchen with gold stars on the ceiling:

    file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/83/03/1CB4C7FD-FB7D-4523-A004-AADE38C0DB5C/IMG_6857.JPG

About the Author

Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author and co-author of twenty-three novels, one book of literary criticism, miscellaneous articles, essays, novellas, and short stories, and the editor of three essay anthologies. She lives in a cottage in Pennsylvania, where she often stares at the ceiling and counts her blessings.

Find out more about Jenny’s published works by visiting JennyCrusie.com

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