Taking recipes out to play

I love this time of year.  Just as I finish my early morning wake me up knitting, just as the clock hits the bottom of the hour, I look out my window and see the sky almost at perfection.

The sky isn't the deep black of night.  It isn't the gray early morning light.  It isn't yet the full sky blue of day.  Its somewhere in between.  It's alive and constantly changing but it hangs there, for just a moment or two, in that land between gray and blue.  

And should there be clouds, what colour then, would the clouds be?  Navy, rich, salt of the sea, with a deep undertone of black.  That's what colour clouds are in this blue gray morning light.  I love these colours, so different than the colours of the night and day.  I dream of taking them right out of the sky and putting them on a palette and painting my fibery world with them.  I know this dream has already been dreamed.  

Somewhere, someone, some very long time ago, felt the need to have that blue gray and that navy and imagined them out of the sky and into the rest of the world.  And somewhere, somebody noticed that certain kinds of plants left hands and  utensils blue when they did certain things.  And then that certain someone decided to do it on purpose.  And discovered all kinds of ways, to make all kinds of colours.

And the rest is history.  That long ago certain someone, or perhaps, a collection of certain ordinary people made magic and created the art of dyeing.  It takes a certain kind of genius to  dream of a thing, and observe a happening and then decide to see how that something works  And most of the time I am content to know I walk this path on the shoulders of genius from long long ago.

And sometimes I am not.  Because it is their blue gray and their deep navy black, and not the exact ones I saw that perfect moment in the sky.  I don't have a certain kind of genius, I am just ordinary folk, but it might just be time to put some old recipes to the test and play.