June Yarn + Pattern Club with Gauge Dye Works!
A collage with three images including a hot pink and yellow flower very up close, a long stretch of blue green lagoon water in front of a green forest, and rusty orange autumn leaves on a gloomy day. In the middle of the collage, text reads, “June 2021 Yarn + Pattern Club.”
Today’s the day! Signups are now open for the June instalment of the Gauge Dye Works Summer Yarn + Pattern Club.
About the June Club Inspiration
Our inspiration for this year’s club started with a video game. I needed something to relax, so I asked my friend Jessie in Portland, “What was that soothing game you made me play when we crashed our bikes on an icy road and I hit my head even though I was wearing a helmet and you wanted to be sure I didn’t have a concussion?”
The answer was Monument Valley and it really is just as soothing as I remembered. But more than that, it’s beautiful to look at. It’s a sort of mind-bending puzzle game where your character finds her way through various mazes, buildings, and landscapes. Playing it, I immediately thought of Catherine at Gauge. I thought, she would like what I’m looking at too. So I found a few screen shots and saved them to a Pinterest board to share with her.
She did like them and we spent a little brainstorming time figuring out what was so great about the design. Catherine, of course, noticed the way the colours in each scene worked together. Most of them had colours that were on the opposite sides of the colour wheel and monochrome shades of those colours. That created really interesting gradients and the impressions of shadows. The other thing that grabbed us was the clean, graphic geometry of so many perfectly straight lines and shapes that intersected and opposed one another.
We wanted to grab some of those elements and play with them, so Catherine dyed up some yarn that had those qualities of opposite colours with bold stripes and gradient monochromes. She included a bit of dark grey to offset the vibrant colours, and as she worked, the colour schemes she created really ended up looking very seasonal.
She had palettes that felt very spring, summer, and autumn. The idea of moving forward with a “Three Seasons” collection felt totally on-brand for both of us, so we went with it.
In my pattern explorations, I kept with both the seasonal feel and the inspiration of intersecting, bold lines and stripes. It took a bunch of iterations before I settled on a sock design and stripe sequence that felt right, but we cannot wait to show you where we landed.
Catherine and I tend to work together in a round-about way, circling around different ideas, exploring what appeals to us on our own and then how the other person reacts to it. It’s really never just a straight line from some single inspiration source to our final collection. We usually notice things along the way that take us in a different direction, like going from the visual graphics of a game to the natural inspiration of the seasons. We found a theme that made sense to us together even if it’s a bit of a way’s off from what got the spark going in the first place.
About Club Sign-ups
Sign-ups for the June club are now open and we hope you’ll love what we came up with this year! I think this collection is our most cohesive one yet, and we’re delighted to offer three colour palettes for the June club inspired by spring, summer, and autumn. The actual pattern and yarn are a surprise, but you can get a good feel for each colour way by perusing our nature images and collages. We also decided to include a, “Surprise me!” option just because we think it’s fun, so you don’t have to pick if you don’t want to.
Click here to learn more and sign up!
If you decide to participate, comment down below telling me which colour way you signed up for!
P.S. We struggled over whether to call our third colour way “Fall” or “Autumn”, but in the end it was decided by graphic design. “Autumn” is a much more similar length word to “Spring” and “Summer” than “Fall” is. So it ended up being all about looks. The fact that we agree about the importance of such things is an example of why we keep doing projects together.
P.P.S. If you need a reminder of what our summer club collaborations are like, check out these listing for previous club patterns and yarns, and this blog post from last year with more about how our process works.
