Welcome to the Painted Room!

The Quiet Thread

Issue No.18 – Welcome to the Painted Room

Stories from our home at 682.5 metres above sea level

Written by ARNE & CARLOS

Some houses are lived in. Others are painted, argued in, loved in, and left permanently marked by the people who passed through them.

When we started working on our new sock yarn collection, we found ourselves thinking about houses that seem to hold on to the people who lived there.

Charleston in Sussex was one reference point, with its painted furniture, decorated rooms and the extraordinary creative world that grew up around it. Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields was another — the imagined home of a family of Huguenot silk weavers, where the rooms seem to carry traces of the lives that passed through them.

From those ideas, we began imagining a house of our own.

It wasn’t a real house. It belonged to an imaginary artistic family of writers and painters. We didn’t know exactly who they were, and that wasn’t really important. What interested us was the world they had created around themselves.

Decoupage is the simple technique of cutting out images and bringing them together in new compositions. We used it to create imaginary rooms and worlds that exist only on the page.

At first, the room came to us in fragments.

We imagined worn floorboards, marked by years of use and dotted with old drops of paint. In places, one colour might have worn away enough to reveal another underneath. Nothing had been stripped back and made perfect. The history of the room was still there, layer upon layer.

There would be books, of course, and paintings — some hanging on the walls, others simply leaning against them. Somewhere there had to be a quiet corner for reading.

And there would be a long table.

We could see that very clearly.

A table that had been there for years, perhaps generations, around which people had eaten and talked and argued. Everything in the room would carry some evidence of the people who had lived and worked there.

In the studio, a sketchbook might have been left open beside the brushes and paints. Linen curtains hung at the windows, faded in places after years in the sun.

And the light itself became part of the colour.

Late in the afternoon, the sun came through coloured glass and threw unexpected patches of colour across the room — onto the curtains, the walls and those old painted floorboards.

Nothing stayed quite the same.

And that was when the colours really started to take shape for us.

As we move the images around, unexpected colour combinations begin to appear. It is a wonderful way of looking for new ideas for colour — often in places we wouldn’t otherwise have thought to look.

Not as eight separate colour combinations, but as fragments and layers. One colour showing through another. Something faded beside something bright. Old paint, textiles, wood and changing light.

The room was beginning to tell us what the yarn should look like.

This is often how we work with colour. We don’t necessarily begin with a colour chart and decide that this shade should go with that one. An atmosphere, an image or a fragment can be much more interesting.

What happens when the light changes?

What colour is hiding underneath another one?

What happens if you put two colours together that perhaps shouldn’t work at all?

Slowly, those fragments became eight colourways, all belonging to the same room but each carrying something different from it.

And then we started knitting.

That was when the collection really came alive.

There is something incredibly fun about knitting these socks because you never quite know what is coming next. A stripe appears. Then something that almost looks like a little pattern. A colour you had almost forgotten was there suddenly arrives.

You keep knitting because you want to see what happens next.

And it never disappoints.

In a way, knitting with it feels rather like moving through The Painted Room itself. The light changes. The colours change. Something you hadn’t noticed before suddenly appears.

And the story continues.

Quiet Corner

Late Afternoon

The Last Brustroke

The Long Table

Sketchbook

Worn Floorboards

Sun Through Glass

Linen Curtains

The Painted Room consists of eight colourways in our Socks & More 4ply, made from 75% virgin wool and 25% recycled polyamide. The recycled polyamide makes it a little friendlier on the planet while still giving us the strength and durability we want from a sock yarn.

Although we have been having an enormous amount of fun knitting socks with it, socks are certainly not the only possibility.

But that is another story.

For now, the last brushstroke has been added.

Come inside.

Where can I find The Painted Room?

The Painted Room collection is distributed worldwide and is available through local yarn stores and leading yarn retailers in many countries.

If your local yarn store doesn’t currently have The Painted Room in stock, ask them about it. They may already be able to order it for you through their usual yarn distributor.

You can also search online for ARNE & CARLOS Socks & More 4ply – The Painted Room to find retailers that ship to your area.