I tend to choose colours the same way, which is to say not from a colour card but from life. Something I love, or keep returning to, or have a quiet penchant for, and then I go looking for it in yarn. The colour comes first, from somewhere real, and the search follows.
Butter yellow came from butter.
There was a practical shape to it. I was making a summer edition for Super Mountain Market in St. Moritz, a winter place, to be worn in summer. I wanted a colour that felt like warmth without heat, a knit for cooler alpine evenings. St. Moritz keeps the sun as its emblem, which did not hurt. But mostly it came from my genuine and possibly unreasonable love of butter, and of one butter in particular: Bungay Butter, made by Fen Farm Dairy in Suffolk.
That is the part that matters more than it might seem. Fen Farm makes their butter by hand: the cream soured, churned, and shaped by wooden paddles, no heavy machinery, one family with a hold on every step. It is, more or less, how I make knitwear. So naming the colour after their butter was not only because I love the stuff. It was a nod from one pair of hands to another.
The colour itself has depth. It is a melange, several tones of yellow and white settled together rather than one flat solid, so the light finds variation in it. I did not build it or dye it; I found the right one already spun, at my supplier. The depth is the point. Real butter, especially salted, is never one even yellow either. It carries its own small variations from the salt crystals worked through it. The melange felt true to that.
I called it butter yellow, not sunshine, not sunflower, not primrose. This is how I think about naming a colour: it should be evocative and exact at the same time, a hue pinned to a particular thing so precisely that once you have heard it you cannot unhear it. You will think of butter now. I cannot help that. It is, at the moment, a very fashionable thing to be obsessed with, and I make no apology for arriving early or on time.
There is, I have since learned, a monument in the town of Bungay called the Buttercross, built in 1689, where farmers once laid out their butter to sell. A town with a butter landmark at its heart. Of course there is.
If you cannot beat your newly realised craving for such a special butter, you can find it here.
