blue-grays

Updated: April 30, 2025

For myself, I have always held that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration, furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into, have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature that the russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow; the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world from a bonnet to a château.

Francis Hopkinson Smith - Outdoor Sketching: Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

Carding together gives a very much better effect in wool, while twisting together is preferable in cotton. Dark blue and white or medium blue and white wool carded together will give two blue-grays, which cannot be obtained by dyeing, and are most valuable.

Candace Wheeler - How to make rugs