You just never know what odd-ball stuff you’ve kept in deep storage in your brain will surface and, seemingly for no reason, invade your consciousness.  My brain remains mercifully uncluttered day to day because I’ve stashed this stuff, like so much yarn, in a maze of backroom compartments, crammed into plastic cerebral tubs.  How else can a person deal with all the input?

There are facts gleaned from reading and research, stupid bits of trivia stumbled upon while browsing the web or watching cable TV, techniques and information learned in the classroom, inspiration and gossip picked up over coffee or during the course of four-hour long phone conversations that were only supposed to last four minutes.  Gazillons of bits will never be called up again in your life. That’s probably a good thing.

Unlike yarn which you purposefully choose, purchase or otherwise obtain and collect, that data amasses whether you want it or not. Also unlike yarn, which you can easily eject from the stash and without regret give away or toss, the brain stuff is irritatingly persistent. You can’t just dump the drive.

It would be nice if I could free up the bits of brain I am using to store the information about how many times Brad Pitt has been nominated for an Academy Award, and replace that with the number of centimeters in an inch, which I still have to look up every fracking time I have to do conversions. 2.54, huh?  Sorry, Brad.  Done.

So this stuff remains to ripen and possibly fester in your darkest back-alley neural pathways. Then one day something pings it to life.  Trust me, that crap is so ecstatic to be free from the confines of the tub that it will rampage around in your head until you do something with it. Purge it. Allow it to streak across the pages of your blog. My friend Vashti and I call this blog-letting, which is sort of like blood-letting only without the horror.

Today’s blog-letting concerns color. Years ago I took a class given by Laura Bryant, who is the founder of Prism Yarns, specializing in hand-dyed classic, fashion and luxury yarns.  Laura is a textile artist, a virtuoso with colors, an entertaining speaker and a wonderful acquaintance, all of which I discovered during the course of the class. Even though I can’t remember the name of the class, only that it contained the words color and knitting, I did appreciate the awesome and awe-inspiring information she taught. That day I learned to look at color in a whole new way, and you can, too.I wish I could say that it stuck with me and that Laura’s words changed my life, but naturally they didn’t.  I locked all that cool stuff in a cerebral tub and blithely went about working with color in my crochet work with the same old, same old unsophisticated eye as I have always. I truly suck at color. Although I can design crochet that’s outside the box, my coloring is very much inside the lines.  I am so matchy-matchy it hurts.

Laura’s favorite axiom is “You don’t get WOW by doing the expected!” and  isn’t limited to color use, but right this moment these words are rolling round in my head like a Technicolor mantra. For some reason I am accessing all that class material and am once again feeling my color empowerment.  I will do the unexpected.  I will do the unexpected.  Soon.

I am not about to spill the secrets here. If you get the opportunity to study at Laura’s feet and learn from her how you to rock your color world, then do it. Check the Prism Yarn site for her teaching schedule. Or you can enjoy her latest DVD, A Knitter’s Guide to Color with Laura Bryant, which you can preview and purchase at the Interweave store here. I just watched the DVD workshop and it’s just as mind-blowing as taking the class, although you don’t get to play with Laura’s piles of gorgeous actual yarn the way we did in person.  Unless you have a world-class yarn stash at home. 🙂