NOW DEVELOPING: COLORWAY COLLECTION #6
Restaurant Crayons
Coming March 13th!
Test skeins
Many restaurants offer their youngest guests a set of four crayons in a little pack which will include red, green, yellow, and blue.
Other restaurants will drop off a cup of crayons–often full to the brim with repeats of these same four colors. The cup-crayons tend to be broken, and the paper wrappings might be curled up at the bottom of the cup. No matter the specifics of the offering, I was always happy about restaurant crayons.
Test skeins
These swag crayons were always a bit lacking in the pigment department. No matter how hard I would drag one across the paper placemat, the color was never as vibrant as I wanted it to be. Also, there were usually only four colors. Restaurant crayons are sold by companies that sell branded swag to companies, and they come with certain constraints upon your artistic expression. Pressing lightly, a layering of colors can be achieved to varying effect. You could commit to pastel tints, but if you didn’t keep the same tension throughout, waxy skid marks would be left. I often resorted to pressing as hard as I possibly could, so that the entire surface was slick with wax and as much pigment as possible, but this tires the hand.
The gift of restaurant crayons is the gift of a moment of relief from boredom, from reality, a chance at self expression, but the crayons themselves didn’t make it easy. The medium complicated the creative process. This is a very good way to work creatively–alongside complications or obstructions that narrow one’s focus. This is a great way to practice pure expression and craft without having too many options to even begin. In times of limited supplies, it’s always an even happier surprise when something interesting comes out.
ORIGINS
For a long time now, I have wanted to do a collection that celebrates the many creative collaborations that have already taken place between my brand and Bernadette, owner of Busywork Craft Supply. With our shared love of bright primaries, interesting clashing, and vintage vibes, springtime seemed like a great season to introduce a palette that we would love and that would also be seasonally appropriate. Like last year, I will be doing a long pop-up at Busywork for Bay Area Yarn Crawl in this March, so I will be launching the collection during my pop-up at the shop. This palette is also influenced by Bernadette’s The Skipper Middy Collar design, for which I’ll be making kits with Corriedale and an accent color in a Merino mini-skein.
I met Bernadette in 2022 when I had recently started my business, and she messaged me on Instagram to see if I would be interested in having my yarn in her shop. She was looking for small indie dyers who might be harder to find in person in the bay area, and that fit the shop’s aesthetic. When I read our early emails, it’s funny to see how professional I tried to be for like two emails before our conversation devolved into the sort of friendship where you send a person screenshots of MCM handtowels on ebay while lying on the couch, too tired to actually watch your tv show or knit your sweater because you own a small handmade business.
View this exhibition
Playing Dress-Up was our first exhibition of mostly wearable fiber artwork, which we opened the first night of the two-week-long Bay Area Yarn Crawl in 2025. In accordance with our theme, we encouraged people to dress-up and try on the handmade pieces and take photos in a photobooth, truly engaging with the work in a way that can only be encouraged in our particular art form. This year I’m focusing on my new collection which I will launch during Yarn Crawl, but we’re also hosting a second fiber arts show this year, called Message From The Threads, curated by Teryn Brown.
Beginning to Develop Colorways
Primary colors have always been a connection point between our brands, Fiction and Busywork. Bernadette’s branding and logo include primary colors plus a muted pink, like my Girl Detectives collection contains primary colors plus a light but highly saturated pink. (Girl Detectives was the first collection that she ordered for the shop.) While I often go for full saturation primaries, I notice she is often drawn towards more complex or subtle versions.
For Restaurant Crayons, I’m looking for a way to blend my preference for strong saturation with what I have perceived as her preference for a less obvious primary palette. This is a challenge in particular when it comes to trying to make the full 6-color palette cohesive. It would be so easy to create a connection between the colors by adding a bit of grayness to all of them, so they are all muted, or by having them all be full saturation. But when all the colors in a palette are muted, I just feel that there isn’t any bite to it. It needs some depth to really grab me.
I’m also trying to give a wide range of values, by including light and dark versions, for much the same reason as above. It feels odd not to have a bright yellow in a primaries-inspired palette, but I have so many bright yellows in past collections that I couldn’t think of an expression of the hue that was both different than anything I had done previously and fit the palette. Believe me, there was a bright yellow until the last minute, but now I’m very happy with the solution I have come to, which is to have a buttery yellow and then to have bright yellow spots on one of the other colors. I think this gives enough of a sense of yellow, which after all, has a strong effect in any palette, and its brightness draws the eye so that it is never lost.
It’s not my usual starting point, but this time I’ve been painting small swatches with gouache to quickly get a sense of ideas I have in mind. It being water-based, yet more highly pigmented than most watercolors, this medium feels closer than other means I’ve tried for quickly representing dyed possibilities. Real dye looks different before it is full exhausted (absorbed) into yarn, even in terms of hue.
As you can see, I’ve also started using real scraps of yarn (from a jar of trimmed ends from various projects) to stick onto test skeins to represent possible accent colors to add, mostly by resist method. These new methods have been really helpful especially when the scraps are from my own past dyes that have known formula I can work off of.
At this point, I definitely feel that I’m closing in on the final palette and have some very promising new tests drying right now to share with you in the next day or so!
If you happen to be in the California Bay Area this March, save the date for my pop-up at Busywork during Bay Area Yarn Crawl, March 13–22! My pop-up is called Mini Mart. More on that soon!