Colourful

I’ve been pondering what it means to be colourful, which is a description of me I  frequently hear and which I love because I adore colour and think of it as closely associated with joy.  My love of colour was strengthened during the years I lived in Asia where the colour palette is richly saturated in both the scenery and the clothes that both men and women wear.  Our book about Myanmar, Observing another Culture: our lives in Myanmar, shows how intense the colours of this beautiful country are and how much the people love colour in their clothes, their homes and their celebrations.  While we lived there I adopted traditional dress as workwear.  Here’s a selection of wonderfully colourful clothes I wore to work at the Myanmar Parliament, where both men and women MPs also dressed with great style in exuberant colours.

From 2007-2016 we travelled extensively and were drawn to countries where both the scenery and the people are colourful.  The strong colours of the gentle agrarian way of life in South East Asia, can also be found in southern Europe – in Italy, Spain and France which we have visited many times.  Our book recording those travels is called a World of Colour shares the best of those experiences.

Although I had never been someone who based their wardrobe on corporate black, I was even less likely to wear black after I returned to New Zealand in 2016.  I also love expressing my creativity and love of colour in knitting projects which I think of as painting with yarn.  I love collecting a variety of yarns in a colour family, and planning how to use them together and seeing the fabric come off my needles. Here’s a few of my most colourful knitting projects, mostly from 2018.