The Colour Collaborative: June - Home

For me, any thoughts on colour begin with the question: what is my favourite colour? I feel that by now, aged thirty five and with two kids and two homes under my belt, I really should know something as basic and fundamental as this. But it's a question which leaves me stumped. I don't really know. It changes all the time depending on my mood and the seasons. My children are very certain of their choices, in that simple way that small people are of everything in their world; Angus, at four, chooses orange (probably because it's the colour of most emergency vehicles) and six year old Bella loves turquoise. 

I am frequently drawn to yellow. I love it, particularly that perfect, sunny, buttercup shade which always makes me feel happy. I've even devoted a whole Pinterest board to it. But I wouldn't chose yellow clothes (although I happily carry my yellow satchel around with me everywhere I go). My clothes fall into a palate of blues, whites, creams and greys, with the odd splash of pink or red. And I am very careful about how I use yellow in our home. (Except in my bathroom, then I do like a nice yellow wall.) It pops up here and there in radios, jugs, pictures, chairs.  

See, that's the thing about colour - it's never straightforward. What works somewhere, or on someone, doesn't necessarily work somewhere else.

I would have said our home was quite colourful. But when I look at these pictures, I see that perhaps there isn't as much colour as I thought. We've painted our walls in very neutral shades - cream, grey, pale green, white. Tones that are easy to live with, easy on the eye, which don't clash with everything else. Our house was built in 1948 and we've tended to choose furniture, patterns and colour with a slightly mid-century, retro feel, in sympathy with the house. 

So the areas of interest seem to come from the accessories, rather like in the way I dress. Colour pops up in the form of lampshades...

...soft furnishings...

... books...

...and crockery, pictures, flowers, family photos, plants, toys... the endless piles of wooden and plastic toys that clutter the place up, or fill it with the joyful evidence of happy children playing, depending on my mood.

What about you? How do you use colour in your home? Are you a fan or neutral walls or bold, strong colours? How do you use pattern and print? Do you like things to match or do you have a more relaxed approach to things? Please tell- I am very nosy and love to imagine what everyone's home looks like!

What is The Colour Collaborative? All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when they work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. Starting small, with just five members for now, we'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways. We're excited by where this might take us, click on the logos below to find out!