Create Your Own!

Three words that strike fear in the OCD/Perfectionist who happens to be obsessed with color. CREATE YOUR OWN! In my lately never-ending pursuit of self-striping sock yarn, it was brought to my attention that the fantastic Jessica of Yarntini offers a Create Your Own Self-Striping Yarn Club. WHAT?!?! YES! You get to create your own custom designed colorway from her 21 semi-solid colors – a rainbow on steroids of possibilities – not once, not twice, but THREE times! Dude. SIGN ME UP!

And I did. I got in and we had to quickly pick colors for the February skein. You can choose to do a 2-stripe, 3-stripe, 4-stripe, 5-stripe or 6-STRIPE skein and I’ll give you a second to guess what I picked. I went with the 2-stripe and picked a nice blue and red for a simple striped sock. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Of course I went for the six striper and promptly panicked. How was I going to choose? I was paralyzed with the possibilities (have you seen her gorgeous colors?)

I ruminated a bit and decided that I definitely wanted to use the dark gray and light gray (charcoal and smokey). But that left me with four more colors. I had no idea.

And then I was driving home from Bar, past the same houses I drive by every single day, and I saw this:

GRELLOW!! I loved the door on this house! How did I never notice it before? But here it was, a bright spot in an otherwise dark, dreary and depressing winter. I had my third color! (Lemon Drop)

Now to choose the others! (This is the part where my OCD takes over in a kind of scary way. There’s a possibility that some might think I went too far. And there are others, thankfully, who will know I didn’t go far enough. You know who you are and I love you.)

Not long ago, on Instagram, I was exposed to a game app that will suck the life out of you if you’re not careful. CONSIDER THIS A WARNING! I cannot be held responsible for how many meals you miss, or how many times your kids have to literally knock you on the head to get you to pay attention to them, or whatever priority you completely ignore while playing BLENDOKU! For those of you who’ve never heard of Blendoku, it’s a puzzle game app (available for Android and ICrap) that has you put colors into their color wheel order. You really have to know your colors and it’s addicting and fascinating and a MUST for anyone who loves color. I can imagine knitting whole garments based on this game. Fair isle, miters, stripes – it’s all there!

It turns out that I started playing Blendoku around the same time that I needed to pick my colors for the Create Your Own club. My brain was on color overload. So I did the only thing I could and printed out all the photos from Jessica’s gallery so that I could shift and sort the colors to pick my last three.

After looking at the color cards, and playing endless hours of Blendoku (RESEARCH!) I had FOUR colors picked out – Charcoal, Smokey, Lemon Drop, and I knew that I absolutely HAD to have Deep Gin in my mix. I thought I might have an inkling as to the last two colors, but shifting around the printouts wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I had to pull in the big guns.

I stole some time away from the family and activated Photoshop. I downloaded all the pictures in Jessica’s gallery and started making stripes. I needed to see what the colors would look like stacked on top of each other and I needed an easy way to move them around. Not only was I picking colors, but I wanted to pick the order of the stripes as well. I put together a file with 21 rectangles and filled them in with all the colors.

Now I had my template! And it would work fabulously for any all other skeins I decided to create. YAY! I set to work: mix, match, scrap, mix, match, scrap. I had it!

My six colors, in order: Olive Juice, Smokey, Deep Gin, Key Lime, Charcoal, and Lemon Drop.

WHEW! It’s the perfect combo of dark and light – each light stripe is followed by a dark stripe – the values are spot on! I sent my colors off to Jessica and waited with bated breath. She was nice enough to indulge me a little and tell me that YES INDEED my choices were wonderful. (She may very well regret the day she let me in this club.)

Today my ACTUAL yarn came in the mail! I could not be happier!!!

It’s EXACTLY what I was hoping for. Here’s a close up:

It’s hard to capture the colors with my phone (I’m actually getting a NEW REAL camera this week – stayed tuned for LOTS of pictures) but the blue is much more teal than blue. But you can see the grays and greens and YELLOW and I love it. Thank you so much Jessica! It’s PERFECT! (It’s taking everything I have not to cast on immediately, but I want to finish my Super Duper Boogaloo socks first! It’s just Yarntini all the time around here.)

I can’t wait to start on my next skein!!

L, C

Unfortunately sign ups are now closed for the Create Your Own Club and Jessica probably won’t be offering the club again for awhile because she and her family are embarking on a big move, but follow her blog for up to date information. Her yarn is gorgeous!!