Break free of the color recession!

 

Milkos | Deposit Photos

Why is this woman sad? I'd guess it's because she's wearing neutral-toned clothing in a neutral-toned room. But maybe that's just me.

Alert hearth/myth readers know I've complained about the neutralization of our interiors many times over the years. (I won't bore you with links. Trust me when I say there are a lot of them.) I've blamed it on HGTV, but it's not just me -- and it's not just interiors. I was chatting with a friend about textiles today. We talked about how in times long past, the rich and powerful dressed in purple and red because the dyes were so expensive. Clothing in saturated colors conveyed status; poor folks wore neutral colors. But nowadays, it's flipped: the wealthy are wearing black, grays and tans, and colorful clothes are for lesser folks.

Cars, too, have become endlessly neutral. An article in The Atlantic this week (that should be a gift link) quotes a study that tracks new car colors. In 2004, the share of new cars manufactured in greyscale colors was 60 percent; in 2023, it was 80 percent. Wonder why nearly every car you see on the road is some variation of black, gray, or white? Now you know.

The homogenization of the American color palette began around the end of World War II, according to The Atlantic article, when developers needed to build new housing stock fast for returning veterans. Limiting the housing styles in a subdivision and the colors of those new houses was a way to meet demand quickly. Then HOAs decreed that uniformity was best. (And doesn't it just figure that HOAs would be part of the problem?)

As for boring car colors, the article puts part of the blame on federal environmental legislation passed in the 1970s, including the Clean Air Act of 1970. Lacquer paints didn't meet the new pollution standards, and more ecologically acceptable paints were more expensive, so manufacturers began limiting the colors that cars came in. 

We've been convinced over the years that neutral colors are better for resale value for both cars and houses, but surveys have shown that colorful finishes actually sell better. Yet here we are, stuck in grayland, even though it could be taking a toll on our mental health. From the article: "A review last year of more than 100 studies of the effect of color on emotion found that gray consistently triggered fatigue, boredom, or sadness." 

This neutralization of our world has been going on for decades now. Color experts, according to the article, think the myths about bland colors being best have become self-fulfilling. They don't believe bright colors will be coming back to our environments anytime soon. 

My friends, you know what to do.

As for me, once my leaky solar windows are fixed next year and the damage from the leaks is repaired, I am drenching my living room in this specific shade of turquoise blue. I mean it.

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These moments of color-drenched blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. No more gray!

Why I haven't been collecting Navajo rugs.

I don't mean to turn this into a fiber arts blog, but here we are. I'll try to find something else to talk about next week.

This is the 36th year that the Museum of New Mexico Foundation has run a Navajo rug auction as a fundraiser. It's always in the courtyard between the Palace of the Governors and the New Mexico History Museum (except for during COVID, when they did it virtually). This year's took place yesterday. 

I would love to own a Navajo rug. However, they are out of my budget. How far out, you ask? Well, I went to the preview yesterday morning to give you a taste. And also for the eye candy.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

I'm kind of looking for a new rug for my living room to replace the 8' by 10' polypropolene rug I have now. That blue one at the top of the rack could work, although it would be a little small at 52" by 72". Navajo rugs come in a number of different regional styles. This one is Moki (or Moqui) style, and the weaver is Deanna Begay. The price they estimated was between $6,000 and $9,000.

That's actually not bad for a rug that size. Here's a bigger one -- 56" by 100" -- that I liked a lot. It's Teec Nos Pos style. The tag shows the weaver, Elsie Begay, with the full rug.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The cost? Between $20,000 and $30,000. But it's huge. And look at the work she put into it! It must have taken her forever to weave. Keep in mind that all of these rugs are handwoven.

I can do stripes. I can do solid colors. I'd go mad doing something like that one.

Or like this one. It's Chinle style. The colors aren't the same as more traditional rugs, but it's still beautiful, right? The weaver is Sylvia Baldwin, I think the tag says; the rug is not quite 2' by 3', and the estimated price is between $1,300 and $1,900. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

All those little diamonds, yeesh. Totally worth the money.

Here are a couple of pictorial rugs. The bottom one features yei, or Navajo gods/spirits; the top one shows yeibichai, or humans acting as yei during a ceremony. The tag on the yeibichai rug says it's 17" by 38" and was priced between $700 and $1,300. I could almost afford that, if the auction price didn't go much higher. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

There were so many beautiful rugs. The last one I'll share is this black, tan and blue one. I really liked it. Like, really liked it. It's Sanostee style, which Mama Google tells me is similar to Two Grey Hills, and it's 32" by 48". The weaver is Bessie Dan. That's her in the photo on the tag, holding up this rug. It's priced between $1,600 and $2,400.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

So maybe if I saved up for a year or two. Or in the case of something like that Teec Nos Pos rug, a lifetime or two.

After my tour of the auction preview, I checked out the history museum gift shop. At least they had stuff in my price range.

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If I were serious about getting a Navajo rug, there's a community auction every month in Crownpoint, NM, near Gallup, that I would probably check out. You buy directly from the weavers there.

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Navajo rugs are all wool. They are meant to be walked on, although the pictorials are often hung on a wall.

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These moments of beautiful but expensive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Just appreciate the beauty; don't think about the price...

Molas: wearable Indigenous art.

I've been fascinated with molas since I first heard about them in a Spanish class in college. So when I heard an exhibit of molas had opened at El Museo Cultural here in Santa Fe, I had to go.

What's a mola? It's an intricately hand-sewn blouse panel created by the Guna (formerly known as the Kuna) Indians in Panama: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The person creating the top makes two more-or-less identical panels, one for the front of the blouse and one for the back. Usually today, you see the panels already separated from the rest of the blouse. The tops aren't everyday wear, and some of them have spiritual elements. But over the years, as the art form became better known, some artists began making molas for trade. I'm pretty sure these two musical panels fall into that category. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Here's a closeup of one of the stringed instruments in the lower panel above, so you can see why I think molas are so cool. The little squares and some of the strips are applique, or sewn on top separately. But a lot of the stripes are reverse applique -- that is, several pieces of fabric in different colors are stacked atop each other, the layers are cut away to reveal the color underneath, and the edges are hand-stitched down. The Guna also embroider some details. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Each shirt takes between 60 and 80 hours to sew. That's a lot of hand sewing.

Sometimes, as here, the work seems abstract until you look more closely. I'm definitely seeing birds and at least one frog.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Most of the Guna live in Gunayala (the former San Blas Islands), but some live in the jungle on the mainland. These Guna haven't had as much contact with outsiders, so their work is wilder and less symmetrical. Here's one example. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

This exhibit contains just a small selection from the collection of Kit and Valerie Kapp. Kit took tourists on sailboat tours in the Caribbean between 1960 and 1971, and while living in Panama, he became fascinated with Guna culture and art. In all, he and his wife Valerie collected more than 5,000 mola textiles, as well as hundreds of carved healing figurines and other items. It wasn't until after Kit died that Valerie realized the extent of the collection. She and her supporters are now raising money to fund a research center and museum for Indigenous art in Panama City. 

In the meantime, parts of the collection are shown in exhibits like this one. It's called "Angels, Mermaids and Umbrellas: The spiritual, whimsical, wonderful art of the Guna people of Panama", and it's open at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe in the Railyard until the end of August.

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I can see parallels between the Gunas' use of color and the dyed yarn we make and use at El Rancho de las Golondrinas. Some people seem to think that folks in more primitive times and cultures lived in brown, black and white, but it's not true. The Guna obviously revel in brightly colored fabrics. And all of the natural dyes we use at the ranch today were available in the 1600s and even before that. Bright colors are not a modern thing.

Which makes it kind of ironic that interior decorators today want everything to be in shades of beige or gray (if "greige" isn't a made-up concept, I don't know what is), with maybe a "pop of color" here and there. To that, I say, ho-hum.

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These moments of fun-filled blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Use more color! Have more fun!

 


 

Roman shade success; Medicare-for-All politics; and a portal opens, maybe.

The Roman shade project is done, huzzah! I installed the shade for the bedroom window yesterday morning. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

As a reminder, this was the old, ugly shade. I think the new one is a vast improvement. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Now that I've done two of these, I'm putting this in the "projects to never do again" category*. The mechanics were straightforward enough, but hanging this shade by myself was a challenge because it was so wide. At one point I had thought about doing two shades, one for each windowpane; it would have been easier to hang two shorter ones by myself. But now that the single long shade is up, I'm not inclined to take it down and start over. At all.

I made this installation harder on myself by forgetting to take down the old shade before screwing the new one to the wall. I just got so excited to get the new shade up that I forgot. The old one used the same clip-in system as the shade in the office/craft room, but there's not a lot of clearance for a screwdriver because the clip tilts in toward the room, and having to keep the new shade out of the way didn't make the process any easier. I guess I could have tried using pliers to bend the clip back and out of the way, since I was going to throw the brackets away; too bad I didn't think of that until just now.

If you're thinking of sewing a Roman shade for yourself, I highly recommend getting this gadget or making one out of a nine-inch length of thin wire you happen to have around the house. Basically, it's a needle threader for blinds and shades. I wouldn't have bothered to get it except that I was ordering some other stuff from this vendor, and it was a cheap add-on. I ended up being very glad I had it. It made the process of threading the blind cord through the cord lock take seconds rather than minutes. 

I like the softness of the new shades much better than the industrial clunkiness of the old metal shades, and of course the new colors work better than that dirty beige. So all in all, I'm glad I made these shades.

And one thing I realized while making the shades is that I had fun figuring out all the steps. Life has gotten pretty repetitive for me -- dare I say boring -- lately. This provided me with a challenge, and I like challenges (within reason). 

So I might be scouting around the house for new challenges to take on. But I'm still going to pay somebody to convert the tub/shower combo to just a shower. I'm not completely crazy.

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* I've posted several times over the years about various projects, often knitted ones: "It's done, and I'm never doing it again." Often, after some time has passed, I end up doing another project like the one I said I'd never do again. So feel free to take my claim above with a large grain of salt.

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That's enough about Roman shades. On to part two.

I spotted this article from Vox in my Apple News feed earlier today: "Medicare-for-all has a doctor problem". The author, Eric Levitz, attempts to poke holes in Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's support of Medicare for All by saying we would have to make changes in our current healthcare payment system for it to be fair to doctors. Healthcare professionals in the US are much better paid than those in countries that have single-payer healthcare systems, and something would have to be done, he says, to make sure they wouldn't have to take a pay cut.

He cites a report in the Washington Free Beacon that claims El-Sayed's partner, a psychiatrist in private practice, doesn't accept Medicare, presumably because Medicare's reimbursement rates aren't high enough. And then he says:

According to a widely cited 2018 analysis by the economist Charles Blahous, if a single-payer system kept provider payments constant, national health spending would rise by $3.25 trillion over a decade, even with administrative savings taken into account. By contrast, if all providers were forced to accept Medicare's rates, health spending would actually fall by $2.05 trillion over the same period.

So I looked up Charles Blahous. He is a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; previously, he was deputy director of  the National Economic Council under President Bush the Younger and has also been associated with the Hoover Institution, a right-leaning think tank that's part of Stanford University (weirdly, as Stanford is pretty liberal). 

Then I looked up whether the Washington Free Beacon leans right or left. Sure enough, adfontesmedia.com says it has a strong right bias and rates it as mixed when it comes to reliability. 

I am all for examining both sides of an issue. But I also think it's important to be clear about where your sources fall on the political spectrum when you're reporting on political issues, especially in these times, and Levitz doesn't. I'm not inclined to take a libertarian-leaning economist's opinion that Medicare for All is unworkable, and I sure as hell would not reference a hit piece in a far-right publication if I were writing a supposedly even-handed report.

Levitz does suggest some incremental changes to make a single-payer system more palatable in the long run, including instituting state-level caps on healthcare payment rates and removing hurdles that prevent doctors trained abroad to easily set up shop in the US. But I think he too quickly dismisses the profound impact that doing away with private insurance would have on our healthcare system. And doctors may not have to take as much of a pay cut as right-leaning economists claim, once the financial barriers to healthcare are lifted and everyone can afford to go to the doctor when they need to. Plus the elimination of the byzantine system of today would not only be good for doctors, but for patients, too.

Yes, people's taxes would go up to support a single-payer system, but the increase would be offset by the loss of the premium/copay/coinsurance morass we're currently slogging through. Are there figures on how much of an offset? Levitz doesn't say.

A lot of doctors already support a single-payer system -- between 49% and 59%, depending on who's doing the survey and how the questions are asked.

Let's see a study from Medicare-for-All proponents that answers the Blahous analysis. Then we can make a better decision on whether to go forward.

EDITED TO ADD: Levitz wouldn't have had to look very far to find a response to Blahous from Medicare-for-All proponents. Mama Google found this one for me in just a few seconds.

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Finally: there's reportedly a seismic shift brewing this week due to an annual astrological phenomenon known as the Lion's Gate. It happens between this Tuesday and August 12th, with the big punch on August 8th. This year's is supposed to be especially intense due to Jupiter's conjunction with the Sun in Leo on the date of the full moon this Wednesday, and particulary auspicious because the date of the portal opening, 8/8/2026, reduces via numerology to 8, a number associated with abundance and with balance between the physical and the spiritual.

I'm not an astrology stan, and I haven't dabbled in numerology for decades, but I thought I'd mention this thing since I keep hearing about it. You can find more info on the annual Lion's Gate here.

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These moments of bloggy pros and cons have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who hopes that good things will come through the Lion's Gate because honey, we are due.