Our Tribe, My Tribe

If you’ve been tuning into this blog for a while you’ll already know how much my yarny tribe means to me, how these girls have been an incredible source of inspiration, support, and reality checks.

And now Scheepjes has made the tribe official.  Just launched this week is a brand new collection, aptly called Our Tribe.  The yarn is called Our Tribe because, wait for it, each of us Scheepjes bloggers has designed our very own colourway!

I’m not kidding here, I was asked to design my very own MissNeriss yarn colourway!

Picture this: late last year, at our annual Scheepjes Bloggers Weekend,(I think maybe this should be renamed the Scheepjes Tribe Retreat, what do you think?), Mr Scheepjes sat us all down with a very serious look on his face, and I thought, oh no, here it comes… But no!  Actually, it was all great news, and he would like to invite us all – the Scheepjes Tribe – to design our own colourways for a new yarn collection!  He then proceeded to upend a huge box of pantone chips on a table and we all went for it.  Well, the others went for it while I cried with for a little while from the overwhelm.

Usually when confronted with a situation where I need to make a definitive creative decision in a short timeframe I feel stressed and the imposter syndrome creeps in, but this time I knew exactly what I needed to do.  Exactly which colours I needed to use:

I handed my choice in and then waited (im)patiently for almost a year for the yarn to be ready….

And then it arrived.  And it is glorious.

The colourway couldn’t be more perfect if I had designed it myself.  Oh wait, that’s right.  I did!

I struggle to put into words how this yarn, how working with Scheepjes, how this tribe of knitters and crocheters makes me feel. In early 2014 I was just starting to create my own designs and I was snapping photos with my phone in the middle of the night and had no idea how to write a pattern.  And suddenly it all changed.  Out of nowhere the creative director at Scheepjes approached me as they had been working with a couple of bloggers and wanted to grow it to a larger handful of crocheters and knitters.

I was so intimidated that very first time I met the other bloggers.  I mean, I was sitting in the same room as Marinke Slump and Maaike van Koert!  Not to mention Kirsten Ballering (Hoogewerf), Esther de Beer, Jellina Verhoef and Maria McPherson.  Thank goodness my bestie Tammy was there to help me stay on an even keel because I remember looking around the room on more than one occasion thinking: how did I get here?

And so it began.  Our little tribe grew steadily, adding amazing new bloggers and saying goodbye to a few; heartbreakingly, to Marinke. Now I feel as though some of these people are the dearest friends in the entire world.

It was this tribe, and especially the support of Scheepjes, that helped drag me through the darkest days of burnout.  It is this tribe that comes together to lift one another up. It’s this tribe who are living definitions of Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic.

I wouldn’t be the designer, or the human, I am without this tribe.

Now, let me tell you a bit about the yarn itself.

Our Tribe is available in 15 colourways, one for each member of the Scheepjes Blogger Tribe (and two from Scheepjes, named for family members):

Kirsten Hoogewerf-Ballering
Rachele Carmona
Susan Carlson
Maria McPherson
Jellina Verhoef
Dedri Uys
Carmen Jorissen
Esther Dijkstra
Christa Veenstra
Esther de Beer
Tatiana Kupryianchyk
Tammy Canavan-Soldaat

The yarn is 70% Merino superwash, 30% polyamide sport weight and 100 grams will give you 420 metres of yarn.  They all have long colour changes with up to five colours in each ball.  Available in all the awesome stockists from December 8.

Here’s what MissNeriss looks like in a colour swatch:

And I also wanted to share my favourite fade:

I won’t ruin the surprise as to which yarn belongs to which blogger, I’ll leave you to guess – you’ll have to tune in tomorrow for the next instalment where Rachele will tell you all about her yarn.  And if you haven’t seen it already, pop over to Kirsten’s blog to read about her colourway.

Oh, and before I go, here’s a sneak peek of a new design I have with this yarn, which is coming very soon!