A Rainbow of Possibilities

So the thing about embroidery is that it doesn't matter how many colours of thread you have. What matters is having the few colours you need. There's a lot of colours out there, and it's hard to predict exactly which ones you'll be using next, and so that leads to having to keep a fair stock on hand.

When we last left off, my stock looked a little bit like this.

This is an 80 spool set of embroidery thread, which is actually only 78 colours since the white and black are duplicated (which is good, you go through those a lot). Also pictured are 4 spools of retroreflective thread (3 light and 1 dark), and 12 spools of waxed thread. Then there's two skeins of basting thread, and some rulers because that seemed like a convenient place to hang them.

The 78 shades I got line up with the Janome palette. That means that any time I want to stitch out a pre-made embroidery pattern that was designed for Janome machines, I can use those threads. I don't particularly want to sew pre-made patterns, and so I've occasionally found myself wanting colours outside of that palette.

Enter the Brother palette.

This is a 63 spool pack which adds 61-ish new colours to my combined palette. There's only one white and black in this pack but I already have white and black so they definitely don't count as new colours. For the rest of the spools there's supposed to not be any overlap between the two palettes, but there's a small handful where you'd have to really, really squint to see a difference.

Of course, I don't have 63 spaces left on my spool racks, but luckily that problem is easy to solve.

I also decided to put my sewing thread up here on the rack, which is the very tastefully arranged rainbow of 24 spools near the bottom. The sewing thread is differentiated from the embroidery thread mostly in that the sewing thread is "cottonized" polyester, which means that it's treated to have a matte finish instead of a glossy shine. It's otherwise very similar.

If you're wondering why the embroidery thread isn't sorted by colour, it's because there's a somewhat arbitrary numbering scheme that they use for the different shades, and it's much easier to find the right number if they're in numerical order.

So will this finally be enough shades for me? Well, chances are that no, it won't be. The trouble is that the most popular embroidery thread colours, and thus the ones that are most commonly included in kits like these, are almost all very saturated, bold colours. This makes it rather tricky to do subtle shading or more naturalistic compositions with muted, desaturated tones. So, I'll probably still have to add to this over time.