The Colour Collaborative: August: Collections

This month I am very excited to be a guest blogger for the Colour Collaborative. Especially as the theme is 'collections'!

As long as I can remember I have loved collecting things. Especially bits picked up when out and about. Growing up on the Isle of Wight, we were lucky to be surrounded by wonderful countryside and sandy beaches. As a family, we would spend countless hours beach combing or walking our dog through the forest and woods.

I remember we all had our own little 'thing' we liked to collect at the seaside. My mum would pick up little yellow shells and my nan pieces of pale yellow and pink rounded quartz. My sister and I were always on the lookout for sea glass, especially rare cobalt blue pieces.

I have a memory of my Grandad holding out his closed hands for me to choose one of the treasures he'd found on the beach. I picked the hand with a pretty pink Cameo that must have fallen out of someone's jewellery. The other hand, and my sisters treasure, was a big piece of blue sea glass.

My love of collecting is something I have passed on to the kids and they can spend ages picking up treasures that catch their eye. Filling up their little bags or pockets with unusual stones, shells and driftwood, and often brightly coloured pieces of plastic too, their colours worn and softened by the sea, but still vivid enough to stand aloud from the abundance of pebbles.

My favourite thing to collect is sea glass. I could spend hours looking for those ocean tumbled shapes in hues of white, seafoam, green and brown and the occasional piece of blue - oh how I still get excited when I find a piece of blue! They're like little frosted jewels, standing out amongst the calm and muted greys and browns of the sand and stones.

In the Autumn our collections turn to treasures picked up at parks and the woods. We gather conkers, acorns and brightly coloured leaves in warm hues - our collections now a mixture of rich reds, golden yellows, and earthy browns.

By the feeling of the weather here this week, I don't think it will be long before we're picking up Autumnal finds. We've already found a few conkers and pretty seed pods. Oh Summer, how did you disappear so soon!

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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

Gillian at Tales from a Happy House

CJ at Above the River

Jennifer at Thistlebear

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.