as promised: roy g. biv

I think I may be ready for Nancy Crow's class next week. Behold:

^That's about 90 yards of solid color, 100% cotton fabric in at least 1-yard lengths. "Do NOT," Crow says, "bring marbled fabrics." Well, some of the greens are a little mottled because I'm not wildly skilled at hand dyeing. And I tried doing some hand dyeing in an effort to be somewhat economical about this extravaganza.

^Red, orange, yellow. In the back, that lovely wood-rose color I like so much (and because the store had a clear run of 6 shades). Tan to brown, and not enough gray. In my usual palette, you can never have enough gray. The pieces in the front are the hand dyes (Rit), the ones on top and in the back I bought.

^Green, Blue, Violet. I tried to buy blue violet and red violet, but in life they're closer in tone than in the picture.

Plus (not shown) 4 yards each of black and white.

Plus, Crow says, "bring bold graphic commercial prints. Do NOT bring fat quarters. We will be working selvage to selvage." (For those of you not up on the jargon, a fat quarter is a half-yard cut in half to yield a piece roughly 18 x 22 inches.)

Ai-yi-yi.
"Bold graphic commercial prints" is so not my usual thing. So I'm packing pretty much anything for which I have yardage and -- ever the iconoclast -- some fat quarters. Because in a class with Carol Bryer Fallert, she said that if she needs a bigger bit of something, she just pieces it. "And," she said, "no one has ever called me on it." If it's okay with the woman who has many, many more awards and accolades than cats have lives, who am I to argue?

The class is next week. I'm very interested to see how it goes. I've been away from color for a long time. Not out of anxiety, but because I think color is so seductive, it can overwhelm, or overcompensate for, other aspects of the work. I like the way a limited palette forces attention into the other aspects of design. Nancy Crow, on the other hand, asserts that she uses a palette of 500 colors. This is going to be so interesting.