The Colour Collaborative: July - Summer Colour

Beach huts and ice creams. 

That's what I think of when I think of summer colour, beach huts and ice creams. For the former, imagine a long row of painted wooden beach huts, facing out to sea in a gentle arc of pastel shades gently faded by the sun and the salt spray. I have to confess this tempting image is as much influenced by the many picture-postcard representations of beach huts I've seen over the years, as by our actual family beach hut on Hayling Island.

But the ice cream...oh, the ice cream. What pops into my head straightaway is not the Mr Whippys and 99 cones I eat every summer, but the magnificent creme glace stalls on our many family holidays in France as a child and teenager. I marvelled at the sheer quantity of choice - twenty or thirty tubs of different colours and flavours laid out like an edible box of watercolour paints. My sisters and I would have fun trying trying to translate the flavours ourselves and I was always intrigued by the varieties we never saw at home like coconut, melon, pear and pineapple. You could choose one boule or two, or even three, and they were served in tall, thin, dark coloured biscuit cones, so different to the pale, bland, slightly chewy ones we ate back at home. And the colours! Pistache green, golden ananas yellow, bright, candy pink fraise and deeper pink framboise and rich purple cassis...slightly mysterious pale turquoise menthe and dark, dark bitter chocolat brown, so grown up and different to the sweet, milky chocolate ice cream we were used to eating. We are spending two weeks in France this August and I'm already looking forward to introducing Bella and Angus to the wonder that is the French glace carts.

But because we don't live in France  - or anywhere near a beach hut for that matter - here is some of the summer colour I see here in Yorkshire every day. It's my kind of summer colour; deep blue skies, dappled shade under the apple tree, flip flops, lines of washing drying in the sun and slices of watermelon ready to eat. It's watering cans and paddling pools, flowers spilling out of terracotta pots on the front steps, it's suntanned feet and painted toenails and swimwear hung up to dry. It's pink sunsets on warm evenings and picking our own strawberries and rhubarb from the garden, it's sunflowers lined up ready and waiting against a sunny wall just weeks away from flowering, and one lone yellow sunflower that just burst into bloom yesterday. 

When summer in this country delivers and behaves as it should (which isn't often, it's true), it is a truly glorious thing to behold and I absolutely love every moment of it. What are the colours of your summer? What do you see around you every day where you are?

Now, if I could just conjure up a nearby beach and the sound of seagulls then I really would be in heaven.

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!