One of the things we are most often asked is "how do you come up with all of these colors?" Well today I'm going to give you a little peak behind the curtain of designing a new color!
Generally, we only design new colors for holidays or special events since we're so busy cranking out all of your favorite QCY colors. Today I'm going to dive into a new color we made for our next in person event, the Zombie Knitpocolypse Retreat aka ZK. ZK chooses a theme for every retreat so their theme gives us a starting point to find our color inspiration. This years theme was The Fair, and one of the teams retreat attendees are assigned to is called Rides or Die. So, we knew we needed a roller coaster inspired colorway.
From there we head to the internet for photos that contain color combos that speak to us and to the theme. I like to use Pinterest or Unsplash to find photos but really inspiration lurks everywhere!
Once we decided on a picture, we take a good hard look at it to determine what colors we want to include, and decide on a dye style that goes with the inspiration but also works with all the colors we want to include. Then we give it a temporary name (Rides or Dye) and write a recipe for version one, because only occasionally do we get it right the first time.
Then its time to put dye on yarn and see where it takes us. This particular color didn't come out exactly as we wanted it the first time. We decided the blue was darker than we wanted and too much of a true blue color compared to the photo.
So we tweaked the dyes and dye style and came up with version two, which had the right aqua blue we were looking for, but the neon pink we needed was showing up way too red, so we tried again for version three just changing up the pink dyes and leaving the rest the same.
And ta-da Rides or Dye Version 3.0 was just the ticket. Next it was time for complementary colors for kits and an official name. Along with a yearly theme, ZK also has theme colors which were a bright red and medium blue for this year. So, Janis chose the coordinating colors for both teams that matched our new color as well as the retreat theme in shades of blue and red/pink. Christen is the master of coming up with punny yarn names and she didn't let us down by naming our new colorway Emotional Roller Coaster.
So that in a nutshell is how we get from an idea to a new yarn color. We hope y'all like our newest color, as well as the quick look at how we do what we do!