Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Everyone has a favorite color. Mine is periwinkle. There’s something about that purply-blue color that brings me joy. I have vacillated since childhood between a true blue and periwinkle as my favorite, but I have never reached outside the bounds of blue’s cool and serene lines. Therein lies my color home, so I am happy to stay there.

But near blue on the great color wheel lurks the enemy. A color so vile and full of phlegm that I cannot bear to have it in my environs. It symbolizes all in the environment that will rise up in the spring and relegate me to hiding in the house from pollen and nature. Despite that, it plagued my childhood as my mother’s favorite color, polluting my childhood home with its nasty, taunting ways. That color, my friend, is green.

There is no color so vile, so ugly as green. When Hannah was doing a study on the history of color theory, she read about the ancient Greeks categorizing some colors as moist and cold (on a scale from dry to wet and cold to hot with stops in between). I’m not sure where green would have really fallen in their color wheel of discomfort, but I know what color is moist and cold on my own color wheel. Absolutely disgusting.

To my great chagrin, Adia, like my mother, also favors green. Of course not the soft spring green that is the only green I will tolerate. No. She favors the deep, dark, forest green my mother loves. You have no idea how many discussions I endured as a child trying to find what my mother described as “true green”, which, to this day, I believe is just her personal value judgment of a particular green’s beauty and not an assessment of its equal measures of blue and yellow. I believe she and Adia could look at stupid shades of green for hours and have deep discussions about their level of perfection that would make me want to scream.

Hannah has a favorite green. It’s a very blue teal. The blue is there to make the green tolerable. To be honest, it’s probably really blue. That makes a lot of sense to me. 

I do have a tolerable green that I use in some projects. The nice, soft green that Malabrigo calls Sapphire Green I find not repulsive. I would not make something only in that color as it would begin to be suspect by the second hank and probably be cast off into the UFO pile for fear of it contaminating the blue yarns in my house and stash before it even reached the halfway point. Such is my hatred of green. 

In a very weird twist, I really like the look of purple when it is beside green. The green is a compliment, only, you must understand. I do not like the green. I like the effect it is having on the purple. I like it so much that, if I am working with both green and purple in a project, I will find a way to make sure they touch as a sort of personal, little color signature. Let’s not look too closely at that. It still has to be the perfect shade of green. I’m not a monster. There are no weak, moist, cold decomposing vegetable matter in an alluvial swamp colors in my work unless someone else makes me put them there. And someone makes me do that far too often.

For what it is worth, my mother HATES pink. Like a deep into her soul hatred that runs so strong she made someone write her note on a different sheet of paper to avoid having to consult a pink piece of paper. I like pink. I bet she hates that. My paternal grandmother liked pink, too. Maybe this link from grandmother to granddaughter, forcing mothers to confront their least favorite colors runs in the family. I wonder what ancient god of color we angered to be stuck with such a curse? If I use enough green yarn, will it stop?   

I think we should start asking people what their least favorite colors are when we ask after their favorites. I’m guessing there are way better and more interesting stories about the least favorites than the favorites. We would get such an interesting view into other people’s personal color choices.