Colour, colour, colour everywhere… If you pay enough attention to colour it starts to fragment your world into elements. What colour is water? Now that is pretty elemental! When does one colour stop and another start? How do you describe the infinitesimal differences between the colours? How do you describe the colours in an artistic piece where one colour morphs into another without so much as a visible brush stroke separating the elements?

 If you think this is hard then consider working with colour via a computer where screens differ and there are no universals, despite what pantone, the colour gurus would have you believe. How do you tell someone across cultures and continents about a colour green, a viridian green that you want duplicated in a scarf of many layers?

These are everyday questions for Marcia Polo the techno silk trader. Today I went to a couple of my favorite gallery shops in West Vancouver. And the question came up in both stores, “what colour do you call this?” One was easy. “Oh that is French blue” Partly I call that French blue because it has a certain cachet. It sells the colour because it sounds elegant or something like that. The colour could also have been called slate blue but that falls a wee bit flat when describing silk.

The discovery for me with this is that you have to be creative with words to find colour descriptions. I always call beige, alabaster or oyster or champagne depending on the tone, anything but beige. Sometimes the creativity is to sell the product but mostly it is to order the product.

Where I shop for silk there are thousands of colours, further complicated with the two tone mysteries of the warp and weft. One set of threads is warped up with one colour and the other set that run across the warp is another colour or sometimes more than one. This is what produces that, oh so sought after, iridescence common to silk. The other buyer wanted to duplicate a particular scarf and we didn’t have a camera handy.

So I jotted down teal (green blue – dark but not too dark, aqua or pale turquoise not too light and viridian or pale pea shoot green like the scarf that we did in that green with French blue/taupe two tone organza and French blue soft silk… I sure hope the scarf designer remembers that colour combination and just incase I attached a photo with the oceanic series (four scarves) hopefully she will pick out the right one.

More on this later for now it is time to visit with my special people in the lovely city of Vancouver!