How To Clean Dirty Colored Socks

Recently, my sister Elizabeth and I went to the Spaghetti Factory for lunch. Of course it's always easy to be a critic and I was looking around at the colours (like I always do) and noticed that the yellow was sooooo wrong in this restaurant. There's the rusty red woodwork and doors, dark green ceilings and stripe in the banquette fabric and then the yellow is this pale, fresh, clean colour (it looks like HC-4, Hawthorne yellow) when it should be a much richer shade of yellow like HC-10 Stuart Gold. It's a dirtier, more muted yellow so it would work way better with the existing red and green.

I did love the vintage Dr. Pepper artwork though!

Here you can really see the contrast.

Then we walked outside and I saw this strip mall I'm always driving by and everytime I do, I cringe when I see the dark, muddy, greeny- gray the exterior has been painted. The whole mall seems to be mounted with all these bright, screaming yellow signs (you're only seeing one side of it) and they really clash with the exterior colour. So a colour consultant must take into consideration the signage going up as well, it's not something that can be ignored!

This Rona gray works just fine with the yellow, in my opinion. It's light enough that it doesn't fight with all the bright yellow signage and other accents on the building in the same colour.

The same goes for this Homesense sign. The gray here is also the right intensity, it's a colour that has the sign be more important than the colour around it which is the point in this application!

My sisters always wait until their 'designer sister' comes to town before they shop for home decor, so whenever I get there, a trip to HomeSense is always a foregone conclusion. It's such a habit (which then results in purchases that would not be made unless I was in town) that my brother-in-law once said to me "Maria, don't you know you're not welcome East of the Port Mann Bridge?" Ha ha 🙂 Well at least your house looks great!

We parked in this lot and as we walked up to the A & W (above) Elizabeth actually was the one that pointed out that the orange could have been just a little bit muddier to work perfectly with the yellow on the building (which is a great colour for an exterior yellow). Good work sis! See the bug sitting in front of the orange and how that orange actually doesn't look so bad with the clean yellow that the car is. But it is a fast food joint, so maybe that was the point.

I really like the colours of this Milestone's. I think the 'Spiced Rum cc-272' colour of the 'pillars' looks terrific with the goldy-yellow and the forest green roof and brackets. I think those colours really give the forest green an updated feel.

I know we are past exterior colour season, but I thought this was a good way of showing the clean/dirty shift in colour and how it's harder to balance than most people realize!

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