Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Embroidery Floss Swatch Book

I have been making myself embroidery floss swatch books.

These will be very helpful for matching floss to color numbers.  

I have a fairly large inventory of  DMC cotton embroidery floss that I store in color order. 


Typically when I have new floss


I wind it onto floss bobbins.  I slip the number tag under the wound floss.

Every so often, I lose a tag and then have no way of knowing the floss color number.  Being able to match my floss to a numbered swatch will solve that problem! 

For my swatch books, I am using two archival scrapbooks.  

For the number system, I was going to use a DMC printed list of their floss numbers but they are adding new ones all the time so to keep my books current,  I thought it best to use consecutive numbers from 1 to 5000.  I printed strips of numbers:

 
I glued the strips onto the scrapbook pages and added the floss next to the numbers.


This system is working so well!



4 comments:

  1. How lovely to have your threads so well organized! They look delicious. It must have been a lot of work to get the system set up.
    I use cardboard bobbins so that I can write the colour number on the bobbin. I do slip the tag in as well, but as you say they get lost sometimes. As a thread runs out I tie the last piece onto the tag and I keep this as a reference sample.

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  2. Thank you! it WAS a lot of work to set up but I am really pleased with the results. Your cardboard bobbin system is a wonderful solution. I have seen so many beautiful bobbins available too!

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  3. will you please do a tutorial on how you did this?

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  4. Hi Laci - Yes I will definitely do a tutorial post -- thank you for the suggestion!

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