This, frankly seasonable, weather has gotten me back into dyeing with madder (orange to red) and weld (bright bright yellow) in the hopes that their brightness will lift me out of the blahs. And so, here we are: two new colors that I love.

New colors make me ponder the issue of naming. Like many folk, I often mock the color names in clothing catalogues. For this winter for example, JCrew (always a font of mockable color names) is offering a sweater in "retro orange" and "roasted cider", leading one to ponder which shade of orange is "retro" and how on earth one can "roast cider" (this is more evocative of a cooking accident then a color). But now that I am on the other side, I find myself feeling a bit more sympathetic to whichever poor person came up with "spiced chartreuse" (again with the cooking accidents). On the one hand, I could avoid the whole thing by just giving my colors numbers, which I was thinking may become an organizational nightmare due to my poor organizational skills, but if I assign each color a number, and then give each variation I end up with a second number, than it actually won't be that complicated. On the other hand, it is much harder to get excited about "3-01" than "retro orange", which isn't all that far off from my new orange, which I think I'm going to call "tiger lily" even though the tiger lilies that grow outside my window have a slightly pinker cast than my yarn.

Mock away.

As for my new red color, I'm going basic, and calling it "vermillion", because it is.