EMPS: Layers of Color, Part One

When I first saw that Carly's topic for this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot was "Layers," the only things I could think of offhand were Cayenne's bandannas and the top I wore to my interview at St. Michael's a couple of months ago. The top is an artificial "layered look" garment, the front half of a black shell sewn into a pink shirt with black pinstripes. I've been to more than a few interviews wearing a black career wear suit jacket, even in summer, but it always strikes me as a bit silly as well as uncomfortable and impractical in the Arizona heat. Whoever is interviewing me is invariably dressed more casually than I am. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. I got the pink and black thing to achieve a similar layering effect as the black jacket without it being quite so hot. Tucson tends toward business casual anyway, if not casual-casual. Former Tucson mayor George Miller caught flack once in the 1990s for wearing a pair of jeans while meeting then-President Bill Clinton. Miller had just come from Tucson's annual Rodeo Parade, which seems like a pretty good excuse!

But, as I say, most of the time the only Blocher who wears layered clothing is Cayenne. She wore a red bandanna with a doggie design on it when we first met her, and frankly just doesn't look right without a bandanna around her neck. The first time I washed the red one, I dug the turquoise one out of John's top drawer for her to wear instead. That looked even better on her, and she's worn them both ever since.

These two examples would likely have been the extent of my contribution to this topic, had I not a) walked my dogs tonight and b) fretted about my hair color (see the entry below this one). It was sunset and cloudy as Cayenne and Pepper and I made our circuit to the end of the block, down the alleyway and back up the other end of our block. I soon realized I was seeing layers of cloud and layers of color, with a wonderful variety of each.

I'm going to let the photos speak for themselves for a bit. Some have been lightened or darkened or saturated to bring out the colors that my eyes saw better than the camera did. Others are unaltered expect for resizing and sharpening. If you mouseover for the photo filenames, you'll see some are labeled with a "u" at the end for "unedited" or "unsaturated."

You can find more of this photo series here.

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis every Monday for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot!

Karen

EMPS: Layers of Color, Part Two

You can't really tell the extent of the what I did from the photo above; but I colored my hair today, and made kind of a mess of it. I seriously considered adding another layer of color over it - which is why this part two of my Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot for the topic "Layers." Yes, I'm posting these out of order for a reason.

Ever since discovering a henna-based product in college, I've occasionally colored my hair with some kind of reddish tint. It's probably been a year since I last did it. But I'm meeting with a potential employer tomorrow afternoon, so I figured it was time. The other day I bought a new kind of L'Oreal, which is supposed to take just ten minutes. It's more or less the same color as the darker of two shades I've used many times before. But although I timed it to the minute, it came out a bit too dark, and a bit too burgundy, which is to say, slightly purple. It also lacks any highlights to break up the darkness of the shade. I happened to be in the driveway when John got home, and the first words out of his mouth when he stepped out of the car were, "too red."

I thought about adding highlights myself tonight to moderate the color, although I realized that for someone who has never done highlights before, this could be a dangerous experiment! But when I went to Safeway, someone there (a customer with red hair) told me to look for a neutral blond and put that over this color to moderate it. So I ended up with two boxes of stuff to try, if I could only figure out which way to go in fixing this. I also saw a hair color stripping product called Color Oops or Oopsie or somesuch, but I didn't buy that one.

When I got home, John recommended that I return the hair products and go to a hairdresser to fix things properly. Carly, too warned of the dangers of my messing with things further. So if I do anything at all, I'll go to the hair salon tomorrow. No more layers of color tonight for me!

Part One will follow in a little while.

Karen