Tips: Use a thread colour chart

Tips: Use a thread colour chart

If, like me, you do a lot of your fabric shopping online, you may find yourself lacking a suitable colour of thread to match a particular fabric. One of the advantages of bricks-and-mortar fabric shopping is being able to choose a matching thread, zip and lining in one trip, if you have access to a nearby haberdashery! Whilst a lot of the online retailers who have haberdashery departments will offer a thread matching service, one tip I’d like to share is to find yourself a thread colour chart for your favourite thread suppliers, if possible. I purchased mine a couple of years ago, and as we are on Covid-19 lockdown, I’ve been using it more than usual, recently, to determine which threads to order for some of the fabrics sitting in my stash.

The card I have is the Gutermann Sew-All shade card. It is a neat little booklet of shade cards, showing the colours in this range. Each coloured square on the image below is made from actual thread wound onto the card, so it gives you a really accurate view of the colour of the thread. There’s quite a wide range of colours included…

..and next to each colour is the ‘number’ (ID) of the thread, so you can then go online and search for ‘Gutermann 623’, or whatever your perfect shade is. (It also indicates which lengths the particular colour is available in).

I find it so reassuring to have the thread card in front of me because, as they always say, the colour may very look different on your screen, no matter how hard they try to photograph it accurately.

I’ve found this to be a really handy tool, so thought I’d share in case it’s helpful! I’m not sure how readily available it is to retail customers – the store I bought mine from a couple of years ago is no longer listing them, but some other retailers do seem to have them listed. I’ve also seen listings for YKK zip colour cards, for example, which I’m tempted to investigate further as I do order a lot of my zips online too!

Do you use colour cards? And if you didn’t know about them before this, do you think you’d be interested in getting one now?

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