The Early Fall issue of Vogue Knitting crossed my desk recently, and once I got past the utter thrill of seeing Ancient Arts yarn on the cover of the magazine, I had a great deal of fun digging into the issue. One of the things that really struck me is the section on olive greens. This shade of colour is very hot for fall, and this makes me very happy as I love greens of all sorts!

Green was my favorite colour as a little girl. I made my mother’s life VERY challenging (or so I heard tell for many years) because I went through a phase when I was two to three where I would only eat green food, only use green dishes, and would only wear green clothes. Thank goodness my bedroom was wallpapered in green already as goodness knows how that would have gone for her if it wasn’t. I don’t really have a favorite colour anymore as I love them ALL, but green still holds a special place in my heart.

Because this shade is a hot trending colour, and because I have a special place in my heart for it, I thought I would share the stories behind the series of greens we have that tie into this fabulous fall trend!

Salal Jungle: is a lovely tone-on-tone green that comes about as the result of an exciting camping trip with my DH. We did a fifteen-day canoe trip through the Broken Group Islands on the coast of Vancouver Island (paddling on the open OCEAN) and one day we ran across two Humpback whales feeding off Benson Island. Hubby was oddly enough unwilling to paddle a 16’ cedar strip canoe with the whales, so we landed on the island to watch them. This meant we had to cross the island as they were on the side with a steep cliff, and to do it we had to crawl through what I dubbed a Salal shrub jungle. Those shrubs were 15 feet tall, dense, and more than willing to rip one’s clothes to ribbons as one crawled through. The light shining down was a glorious stained glass like green that just had to become a colourway. I will never forget that green, those vicious but lovely shrubs, or those magnificent whales!

Sagebrush: is a lovely soft colour that is a tribute to a place, a plant, and a person! Based on a shrub that grows in desert conditions, this colour brings back childhood camping trips to all sorts of fascinated places including the painted desert in the USA and the Badlands of Alberta where we would hunt for dinosaur bones. This shrub is amazingly sturdy and blooms with the prettiest soft yellow. It always makes me think in particular of Kamloops BC, which is where the fabulous “other” Caroline lives, and so when I was doing colours for each of our staff I chose to do Sagebrush as a tribute to her home and this interesting desert plant.

Herbes de Provence:  I love to cook, and of course French cuisine is always a tasty and challenging part of any chef’s (or want-to-be chef’s) repertoire. I was very lucky a few years ago to actually go to France and enjoy the cuisine in situ, which meant that inevitably a colour inspiration would have to come from it. This colourway is drawn from this tasty tradition and the herbs that are so often a part of it!

Enchanted Forest: this colour is named for a tourist stop along the Trans Canada highway in BC, which is situated in the mountains in a lovely forest with a series of streams and ponds nearby that are full of wildlife and yellow water lilies. On long camping trips with the family we went by this tourist attraction many times, and it never failed to exert a strong lure on us all. It was a place of mystery and excitement since we rarely ever stopped there. To this day I look forward to drives through the area for its immense beauty, for the nostalgia associated with that mysterious tourist destination, and I always watch for the miniature green and white paddle boat that is anchored in the stream out front! This yarn captures all the colours of an enchanted forest and the streams and ponds that can be found in hidden glades within.

Summer Dreams:  Much of my inspiration for colours comes from nature, and this colour way is no exception. This colour makes me think of a meadow of grass in a forest clearing at the end of the summer. It has just started to brown thanks to the inevitable progress of time as the seasons move towards fall, and so it has shades of vibrant green still left from high summer, as well as shades of green/brown and tan that form as the grass starts to go dormant in fall. It evokes a feeling of nostalgia as we dream of high summer, and radiates the remaining warmth of the sun.

Mama’s Retro Kitchen: This isn’t really an olive based colour, but it fits in this trend anyway, so I had to include it. This colour comes from my mother’s and my great Aunt Mary’s kitchen and back porch. My great aunt Mary loved it so much her bathroom was also this shade, right down to the porcelain fixtures! Both were excellent cooks and very memorable women. Some of my very vivid childhood memories come from spending time with them, and this colour just naturally arose from thinking about those fabulous 50’s inspired kitchens they both loved so much.