Colour Therapy: Why Colourful Crochet Makes Me (And Possibly You) So Happy!

Pictured: My Rainbow Hexagon blanket made with Hayfield Spirit yarn in the colourway 'Sundown'...my one true love lol

“Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself forcefully”

- Vincent Van Gogh

Feeling quite low and blank one day, I picked up my monochrome blanket wip to add another row, but as much as I love the blanket I just wasn’t ‘feeling’ it. I had a sudden impulse instead to make something colourful, so I randomly grabbed four different colour yarns from my stash, and, without rhyme or reason, I just started to make a single granny square.

...The effect on my mood was miraculous.

By the time I’d attached my third colour change for the penultimate round of soothing, repetitive stitches I’d already forgotten about my deflated state.

How is it that colour can have such a powerful impact on our state of mind? Why do we find it so satisfying when we spot a rainbow in the sky or take in all the bright contrasting shades in a box of crayons or a bouquet of flowers? It’s because colour is intrinsic to our humanity.

Some 90 million years ago, homo sapiens began to view the world in trichromatic vision (seeing things in red, green, and blue). By mixing these three pigments together, our ancestors could see the world in full colour, a trait scientists believe we evolved to sense physiological changes in other human beings such as turning red when we become angry or aroused.

Today, the colours red and pink still hold these meanings for us – love, passion, danger, etc – but as well as using colour to help us understand each other, we also use it to express ourselves creatively.

Case in point with the humble granny square. I wanted to break out of an emotional and creative funk and was able to thanks to bringing a teeny bit of colour into my day.

As usual with me, if I start something small it ends up snowballing, so my single therapeutic granny square turned into these….

....which turned into this!

Let me know if colourful crochet lifts your mood too! Grab a rainbow yarn colourway today and see where it takes you :)

Fan of colourful crochet?

• 0%YES! YES! YES! Cover me in rainbows!
• 0%Depends on what mood I'm in...
• 0%Hmm, not really
• 0%I'm monochrome or go home!