The colour mystery

O.K. let's start with where the canning intersected with the sewing.

I have been making various things, with a one week pause because my sister-in-law and mother-in-law are here. They are wonderful and it has been a great week.

But back to canning for a minute.

I have been making mango and ginger chutney and processing it in my new super duper giant canner, which is thrilling to use:

Just imagine what I can unleash on the family with this baby.

One of my great pleasures has been stirring the mango mixture because it is so colourful and so beautiful:

I mean how can anything that looks this upbeat not make you cheerful? Impossible not to smile when you look at this.  And below is my mango jam (all eaten up already by the relatives, at least I now know what to make them for Christmas), equally zippy looking:

And I have also made, among other things, a Jamaican banana and ginger jerk type chutney with a lot of pep and great flavour. 

However it looks like this in the jar:

I mean how non tasty does this look? It's is the kind of stuff you serve and have to say "Look I know it looks like gruel but it's really, really good." I should have added turmeric or something for colour. So this stuff, which is one of my best, is still sitting there looking like glug, jar after unopened jar.

The problem is the colour.

Which brings me to a huge contribution I am about to make to Western Thought and Civilization is general.

Maybe no one should wear clothes in colours that they would not eat.

Hang in there with me, think this through.

One thing that really strikes you in Florida is all the colour in the clothes. Walk into a Belk (southern department store) and the colour in the ladies' dresses is sort of an explosion. Look at Lilly Pulitzer clothes:

As  my sister-in-law observed these aren't the colours they wear at home in Nova Scotia. 

Gee that is too bad, and about to change.

OK I get it. 

I mean the colours reflect the environment, and in Nova Scotia for 3/4 of the year, in rain, sleet, snow, frozen ground seasons, this is what those colour are:

OK, now how about this.

If it is grey and dark outside why not resist? Why not counter-attack?

Why not dress uplift not downshift?

I mean who wrote the rule that people in February shouldn't wear sorbet rainbow colours? 

What's with the dead colours when you need life most?

What's with wearing what you wouldn't eat?

So I am staking out a place of resistance here, and with SIL enabling, here are my new sunglasses:

One step at a time folks, one step at a time.