19. Chingly

Chingly is a Scots word that means gravelly or pebbly. This feels very appropriate, as many of the things I found that match this colour are in fact pebbles or shingle and – just like this yarn – inhabit a very interesting place on the chromatic spectrum: a soft golden land between green and grey.

On the cover of a book by Debbie Zawinski – In The Footsteps Of Sheep – the eponymous sheep bounce over rocks that are just the colour of Chingly. The rocks on that photo remind me of several places in Shetland where there are stones of a similar hue, such as Betty Mouat’s Böd, in Scatness…

…and the walls (and roof) of the Crofthoose Museum.

On a beach in Shetland in 2017, Mark and I found one beach covered in different-coloured pebbles; can you see the one I think of as the Chingly-coloured one? What fun – a pebble-coloured pebble in a sea of pebbles!

In Weston-super-Mare when the tide is low, the greenish mud reminds me of this complex yarn shade, too…

…as do the piles of greenish grey oyster shells stacked up on the beach at Whitstable.

In my garden, lichen-clad old concrete posts speak to this shade.

Some of the wood – both trees and fences – has also developed a kind of Chingly hue, where the wood is silvery grey yet also greened by algae or lichen.

I have a few stamps and a flier from the Shirley Leaf & Petal Co. that remind me of this colour; it’s nice to have a couple of different colours of stamps around, so you can help clarify which one is the closer match. In this case, I think 3.5p is just right; 16p being perhaps a bit on the yellowy side.

I find myself thinking about how it’s like the sea, but only on very specific days where the light is simultaneously grey and green and gold.

This isn’t quite right, but something about the intensely yellow green and grey quality of the light on this beach in Nerja in 2011 really puts me in mind of Chingly…

…as does this moody sea at Amroth beach in Wales, seen in the miniscule sliver of daylight offered one dark day towards the end of December 2011 when we visited our friends Brenda and Tonia there to see in the New Year.

This year I’ve noticed that on grey autumnal days with complex golden light, the sea here in Hastings can also been a sort of shade of Chingly.

Of what soft grey green and golden places does Chingly remind you?

These posts coincide with the KDD & Co. Colour Compass advent calendars. Each day, throughout December I’ll be opening my calendar beside you, and exploring the yarn shade that is revealed for that day. Read more about these posts here, and prepare for a few weeks of polychromatic fun as we discover the shades together and revel in their suggestive associations and creative possibilities together! Even if you don’t have a calendar, I hope you’ll love exploring colours with me, and thinking about each shade as it appears, and how it is connected with the everyday colours of your life.