Bread & Butter for Lunching Ladies, Jam with Toast and Sunday Suppers.

Food has always been a big part of Atelier Ellis – the naming of colours and their relationship to living especially. Because I believe most goodness happens around the table. We eat, we Pinterest, we talk and we dream. A slab of wood and legs mean life happens here.

Creating a colour is, of course, writing a recipe, but it is also writing a poem. Trying to be succinct and precise – when really, I want to throw in handfuls of adjectives – whole sentences, in fact, so you understand why this colour exists.

Bread and Butter is actually 4pm after school, catching a precious half-hour with my mum before she headed off on night shift. Fallen Plum is a memory of the 26?  fruit trees planted in our suburban back yard. And I really liked plums, my sister took care of the oranges. And that sums up the two of us entirely. I continue to plant fruit trees wherever we land, it being a compulsion to rediscover that simple joy. 

And Lunching Ladies  -  that’s watching my step-daughter become the maker of wonderful food to many.

Seeding and weaving ingredients, names and colours together in the hope that it brings comfort, memory and the understanding of why food and life are in fact intertwined. And that colour can also hearten, and memory mark the toast, the tea, the jam and the love for all.

A round up of our favourite food-loving, colours. I hope we’ve made you hungry.

Cassandra x

Photography by Ellen Christina Hancock