Pinterest Inspired

I'm on Pinterest at least once a day.  Some days are more boring than others, so I have to visit pinterest more often.  One of the popular things I've seen was something like this:

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Essentially, you wrap your headphones/earbuds cord and it no longer gets tangled!  ANNNDDDD, iz pretty!

My new earbuds that I got in Australia get really tangled.  I think its because the cord is kinda rubbery, so when the cord rubs against itself, it sticks really bad.  I usually try to roll them up neatly around my fingers, but I really liked this idea, so I finally decided to just suck it up and buy the string to do it.

I used embroidery floss.  I didn't know that was the name of it.  I was walking around Jo-Ann's telling Teh Singing Cat Lady that I was looking for some type of thread and I'd know it when I saw it.  I did.

I picked up this:

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I knew that I wanted the "fade-y" thread when I started thinking about doing this project.  Way back in the day, Teh Sister and I actually acquired an entire box full of this "thread" from Teh Mom.  I considered just waiting till the next time I went home, home to pick some of the thread out to do this, but this pack was $5, had all the colors I could possibly want, and Teh Singing Cat Lady hooked me up with a 50% off one regular priced item coupon, so all this embroidery floss was mine for just $2.50.  WIN!

Essentially, you are making a "friendship bracelet" with your earbuds to do this project.  Craft Geek has a tutorial (it was where the pinterest link took me).  She also demonstrates how to tie the knot that makes the spiral around the cord.  I honestly had to rely on very sketchy memories of doing this in middle/high school to get me started because she demonstrates tying the knot on the right side.  I tied all my knots on the left side because everything I do is backward because I'm left handed, I guess.  It was just more natural for me to do it that way.  I also didn't count out my knots.  I just kinda eyeballed if the sections were about the same length.  I wasn't going for perfection for certain.

I didn't get photos of the actual process of tying the knots, because its kinda hard to take photos of yourself while tying knots.  I'm skilled, but not that skilled...

Since I had sooo many colors to choose from, I kinda got overwhelmed.  I had so many cool combinations that I thought of: warm colors (there were FIVE sets of pink), cool colors (blue, green, purple), sunshine (orange/yellow), just blue, just black..  But as I looked closer, I realized that the red faded to black and there was also a white/grey strand... NC STATE COLORS!!!!!!!!!!

It only took 1.5ish skeins (apparently that's what they call one whole thing of the floss) of each color.  My skeins were 10 yards each.  This project also required bandaids and scissors.  Bandaids to protect the finger area that I kept pulling the strings against (which started to hurt after about hour #2) and scissors to cut the crazy strings when you're done.

So let's get started:

There were strings from where I started the knot, but I just pulled them down and wrapped the knots over them.

Here you can see the dangly pieces from where I started.
I did this for each time I started (3x, the main cord, L cord, R cord), you can't tell at all.

Here I'm 1 color set away from being done with the main cord.  This took the majority of the time since I was trying to keep the color sections even and hold the string against the cord so it wouldn't get bunched up.
Also, you can see my ghetto spindles.  I had the floss loose, but it knotted up that way.. Then I wrapped it around my fingers, and it still knotted up, so I had to outsource..  I cut out rectangles from a cardboard box.  My suggestion, cut out the cardboard in the shape of an H so that way the thread on the edges doesn't slip off like mine kept doing.. 

Main cord and 1 earbud cord finished!!  Doing a single color on the earbuds was MUCH easier than dealing with the extra string and the cord, so it made for much faster work...  (about 1-1.5 hours per earbud cord vs several hours (4+) for the main cord, no jk)

I was undecided on how I wanted to do the earbud cords, so I went with a single color for each cord.  Looking back, I would have done the earbud cords one color (red/black) and the main cord the other color (grey/white).

Finished product!

It might not be the best friendship bracelet earbuds masterpiece, but it will do for me!  The cords didn't stay straight for most of the time and sometimes the spiral goes a little wonky, but I'm sure no one will actually notice.

PS.  I have all that extra string left if someone wants to claim it.  I can mail it to you.  I have no idea what I would do with the rest of the string other than knot up my back-up earbuds.. and I don't really like them enough to devote that much time to them....