December days: Colours

[liv]

bugshaw asked for Colours you saw that day, and when I put the calendar together I accidentally put her prompt on a day when I'm working from home, then travelling back to Stoke probably after it gets dark. So I don't have many opportunities to go out and find interesting colours. I will talk about the colours in our home instead.

We haven't yet had a chance to really impose our taste on this house yet, but we're looking forward to doing that. As it stands it's very neutral, cream walls, white ceilings, light brown carpet. The bathroom has some subtle, understated splashes of a sort of dark blue-green to make it less starkly white. We do not yet have anything like enough curtains. The ones we do have are those I took from my old house in Stoke, and are cream with red and gold detailing. Anyway we'll see how that goes, curtains are often a good way to do something interesting with colour without too much commitment.

And the office where I'm composing this, which was previously a four-year-old girl's bedroom, has a pink frieze with cupcakes and teapots. Initially I was very keen to get rid of it because it's so very four-year-old girl pink, but you know, teapots, and it's kind of growing on me, and it's reasonably tasteful and only six inches high. We do have plans to paint some kind of mural in here, just because it's our house and we can do that. Inspired by the one in khalinche and timeplease's house. But that's a very early stage proto-idea.

In terms of furniture we have been gradually acquiring vintagey dark wood stuff from Emmaus. I really like the colour of dark wood, the way it sort of eats light and throws it back only a very short distance, such that it always feels very cosy to me. This choice also helps to make our place a bit less the obvious default décor that all our friends have, I mean, we're not obsessed about it, we do have some modern pine and other light woods too, but dark wood bed (which has red linen; jack thought that red sheets might be too ostentatious but I saw no reason against having a colour we actually like even if it's not very fashionable) and the lovely éscritoire we've given a new life as a laptop desk, and an increasing proportion of our book shelves. Of course the books themselves are any number of colours; I sort my books by size and jack sorts his by author, so they're just a jumble of random colours, and probably not very interesting to list. Somehow I feel less comfortable in places where books are sorted by colour, though, it makes a space feel show-homey rather than lived it.

Looking out of the window, I see a typical December suburban scene. Most of the surrounding houses are built from the same classic light yellow Cambridge brick that ours shares. If I were a poet I could tell you about the whole spectrum of greys represented by bare branches and winter skies, because it is visually interesting but you have to be willing to look at it carefully and patiently, and there aren't a lot of colour words for those nuances.

The other thing we're doing with this house, again gradually, is starting to put up our own art, most of which was given to us as wedding presents, because we asked specifically for art rather than appliances and other domestic stuff. And we live in England where you have to be a homeowner, ie part of the financial elite, to be allowed to put nails in walls to hang pictures, which is a completely ridiculous way to run society but given that's the way things are, we are making the most of finally being allowed to.

So the most interesting colours in this house come from hatam_soferet's unbelievably beautiful wedding contract. My getting married icon is a small detail from that. A big part of the reason I decided to get married rather than just commit to our relationship privately was so that we could commission art from hatam_soferet and she ended up going way beyond the original brief and making us something more beautiful than anything I could ever have imagined owning. So its major colours are gold, purple, blue and and a completely gorgeous bluish red; it has kind of the feel of an illuminated manuscript but it's also quite modern and individual. Even though it's foliage themed there's only a tiny amount of green in it. And it's just making me so very happy to have this on the wall of our house; it was in my living room before but it's so much both of ours that it never quite felt right.

[December Days masterpost]

Comments

[cjwatson]

I'd just like to say that I hadn't actually properly read your wedding contract before (I looked at it on your wedding day, of course, but there were lots of people and I didn't want to monopolise it), and it is a beautiful thing both in aesthetics and content.

[liv]

Thank you for commenting! Since the contract is in our house now, as we're gradually inviting people who haven't been here before they're reading it and we're having conversations about the words we composed, and that's a really nice thing to be doing a couple of years on. hatam_soferet has told me that other clients of hers have asked to adapt our text, which I thought was really personal to us but seems to have worked for at least some people as a description of the relationship they want.

I thought when I mentioned the contract I should probably in fact take the opportunity to write out our text, because I get really grumpy about pictures of text on the internet, even extremely beautiful pictures of text. And then I decided against it because it seemed not quite in the spirit of the post, but that would in fact be better for accessibility and generally more in line with my principles.

[hatam_soferet]

bounce hug all the loves

[naath]

I sorted my books by colour once. Then I couldn't find the ones I wanted... so I stopped. It looks pretty though :)

Sheets in the colour you like best are awesome.

[redbird]

I hadn't realized there were people who sorted their books by color, on purpose (as distinct from having decided to put all the DAW or Gollancz science fiction together and thus having a huge swatch of bright yellow).

A friend of mine once wound up with books sorted by color, but that was a prank by the people who were helping her move. She asked them to unpack the boxes of paperbacks, and I think assumed they would be shelved either randomly or alphabetically. She didn't leave them sorted that way because, as naath said, she couldn't find anything that way.

[zhelana]

So many colors! All of the color in my house is books on bookshelves. Otherwise, it's all cream walls and brown floors.

[hairyears]

I was very glad to see the Wedding Contract framed and on show: it is indeed a thing of beauty.

[bugshaw]

It is a lovely contract, and so full of things to return to and look again.