What’s wrong with feeling blue? …how to appreciate a colour that I never liked!

At the first semester of the Knitwear Design Education, we were given a task: Take photos of a colour that isn’t one of your usual go-to colours.

I didn’t find it difficult at all to decide on which colour, since I never liked blue, for some reason. To me, blue is acceptable for jeans, but apart from that, I see no reason for this colour to be part of my life….at least that’s how I was thinking at the time!

Now, all of a sudden, I found myself on my bike, touring the streets of Copenhagen to take photos of shades of blue.

It’s quite thought-provoking to realise the amount of blue that I never noticed before. I honestly think that I have been ‘blue-blind’ earlier. All of a sudden I would notice traffic signs (a little embarrassing, I know); the amount of blue cars; blue houses; blue sky (okay, maybe not an awful lot of that in Denmark); bicycles; coats; shoes; and an impressive lot of blue stuff in my ‘blue-has-no-access-home’(?) What happened was that all of a sudden I noticed the colour blue – in all its beauty!

Of course, this called for reflection. Since I am not colour blind, what could be the reason that I had never before noticed this colour? I realised that my mother, who never liked blue, must have influenced me...somehow!

Furthermore, this realisation made me capable of becoming aware of the nuances and delicateness of the colour blue, which unexpectedly made the colour interesting for me to investigate further in my work.

Hence the decision that going forward, blue will be part of my life and found in my designs – which is also the reason why I am at present working on a new design, ’Mr. Blue’ (a men’s t-shirt with a sleeve option).

Did you ever consider whether there are colours that you either avoid or simply just do not notice? What would happen if you had a better look at those colours?