Autumn Palette

In the 1980’s when I was a schoolgirl, I had a fairly erratic relationship with colour. I wanted to be Madonna or Cyndi Lauper when I grew up. Edgy fashion meant wearing flourescent green socks with your school uniform. There was a lot of bright pink, stark white and pale denim. As the decade continued, some scarily dark primary and tertiary colours emerged – dark purple, bottle green, deep mustard and French navy.

Thanks to Molly Ringwald and Fergie (the Duchess of York, not the singer), red hair was the height of fashion and I’ve never really gotten over my desire for waist-length, wavy, red hair.

Because I had naturally strawberry-blonde hair and a love of coppery, semi-permanent rinses from the supermarket, I was dressed as though I was a redhead.

Fergie wore a lot of bottle green so I found myself dressed in a bottle green. I didn’t exactly complain but in retrospect I think it would have been better if I’d mirrored Molly Ringwald and dressed in pink instead. Still, at age 12 I didn’t give a hoot about what I wore.

After a decade of bottle green I thankfully moved on. I wore a lot of tye-dye and purple, but at least I got away from bottle green.

To this day I’m very nervous about the colour, but I do love almost all other greens. So when I found myself looking for a base colour for a faux-isle hat, bottle green was the best choice.

 I still don’t love bottle green, but I think at least I’m a bit less frightened of it now.

Apart from fear of a single colour, I also have a difficult relationship with a whole palette of colours – what is often called an Autumn palette.

I think it must have been trying to convince myself that I was a redhead, but I really did have an honest attempt at being an “Autumn Beauty”.

Another popular fashion focus of the 1980s – deciding what “season” you were based on your colouring and dressing accordingly. A lot of people took this very seriously and many still do. Being an Autumn Beauty involved wearing browns, russets, oranges and gold. I think that bottle green could have been in there somewhere too. Autumn colours didn’t suit me no matter how I tried to convince myself.

I’ve since decided that I don’t buy the idea of each person being a particular season. I prefer Trinny and Susannah’s approach which you can find a summary of here. (I think I’m in the last group, best suited to mid-tones).

So now it’s Autumn in Australia, and in Victoria we do Autumn very well. The further north you go, the less distinct the seasons become. If you go far enough north people refer to the “wet season” and “dry season” – Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring are theoretical concepts more that distinct seasons.

But I live right at the bottom of the mainland and we do Autumn beautifully. This has made me want to knit with an Autumn palette. Unfortunately, the colours don’t really suit me.

So I decided to raid the stash for colours that suggest Autumn rather than strictly reflect it. Here is what I put together.

If you compare the colours I put together with the “true” Autumn colours of the leaves, you can see that I’m kind of kidding myself a bit. Maybe my selections more wintery, but I’m still determined to make an Autumn themed piece.