The Colour Collaborative: April: Red

I set myself a challenge with this months prompt: go and find red things in the house. I had to look hard but half an hour spent wandering around the house, camera in hand, looking for a particular colour is pretty good fun and I enjoyed seeing what I could find. It's not a colour I seem to choose. I like it in very small amounts I would say. I like the punch it brings to pastels and neutrals, I like to see a pop of it in pattern, and I especially like it with white and pink.

A glance in my wardrobe revealed the same - a few red and white striped nautical style tops and that was it. No red dancing shoes. No slinky red dress. Navy blue, pale blue, white, mustard yellow, pink, grey - these are the colours you'll find in my wardrobe, along with about thirty Breton tops.

I did find a lot of red in my kitchen cupboards though. Some of my favourite products (Heinz Tomato Soup, for example) or household names, like Oxo stock cubes, have built brands around the colour red and it's successful because it's so eye catching. Our eyes are drawn to red and there's a good biological reason, it being the colour of fire, poison, danger and all that. 

But my favourite red product - to look at and to eat - is the Tunnock's Tea Cake. We all love them in this house and I buy a box almost every week. It's nothing like what I would call a tea cake (a fruit bun which is usually toasted and buttered) but is a soft biscuit base topped with gooey marshmallow and covered in milk chocolate. I am told the navy blue and gold wrapped dark chocolate ones are also good but I will always be a milk chocolate girl at heart, try as I might to make myself like dark chocolate. One is never enough and I reckon I could fit the whole thing in my mouth in one go if I tried. Ok, I have tried and I can. I bite straight into mine. Bella, who says she likes them "because they're super yummy", likes to carefully nibble all the chocolate from the marshmallow before eating the rest.

And the packaging! It's perfection. I like to take off the foil wrapper quite slowly and then smooth it out with my finger tips, starting at the centre and working outwards, following the red and white lines to the edge. If you haven't ever done this, try - it's unbelievably satisfying.

I believe the design has remained the same since the 1950's and there is a strong retro look to the colour and pattern, similar to the equally appealing Brasso polish. Scottish artist Gillian Kyle has created some fantastic and very succesful products based on this packaging, drawing on the affection people have for this...biscuit? Cake? I don't know what I'd call it but I do like to eat them.

What about you? Do you like Tunnock's Tea Cakes? Do you like the colour red? Even better, are there any slinky red dresses in your wardrobe?

Don't forget to visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, just click on the links below:

Annie at Annie Cholewa

Sandra at Cherry Heart

Jennifer at Thistlebear

Claire at Above The River

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 a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. 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.