A Flourish of Floss

Above is a pic of my hoard of embroidery floss which I had collected into one place as I try to sort out which of the colors called for in this free chart I found online I already have. The chart uses DMC which I have a lot of but DMC accounts for less than half of the colors in my hoard. So I needed to find out if I could discover the DMC equivalent of the other brands and sure enough I found a good selection of conversion charts.

The best one of all is the one I found at Cyberstitches though as it gives conversion to and from several brand names and several of the kit brands as well. I had two kits, one a Dimensions Gold and the other a Candamar.

I spent hours and hours on this project in the last two days and ended up discovering the exact DMC color or an equivalent for 12 of the 90 colors in the chart. And four of those are actually just 'close enoughs'. I'd hoped for 20 to 30.

It's possible I can put together a few more 'close enoughs' from a bargain brand that has no color numbers on it and the old hand-me-down threads from brands that no longer exist or whose codes are no longer what the bands sport. A good 50% of my hoard fits one of those categories.

It feels like a lot of work for such small return. It would be so much easier to go buy the thread. But buying full skeins of all 90 colors would make this small cross stitch or needlepoint, in spite of the free chart, more expensive than a Dimensions Gold kit for a 16 X 20 picture that includes chart, canvas, thread and needles. That dolphin kit seen in the pic cost over $30 13 years ago. For most of the colors in the planned project I need only a yard or two of a couple strands not the 8+ yards of six strands in the typical skein.

So, especially since it looks like I'll still need to buy over 2/3 of the colors, I need to set up a system to insure that the remainder of the thread from this and every other project past and future, can be quickly identified and found for future projects. That means organization of the hoard and useful record keeping that keeps track of the colors, brand codes and conversion codes and locations of all my thread.

Arrrrrgh! I just took another look at the color list for the project in my note ap--the list against which I've been checking all the colors from my hoard today--and discovered that the list was missing it's bottom half. Now I'm going to have to check that bottom half against the lists I made of the codes from my hoard. Well at least I can do that without getting it all out again. This lists are all on the clipboard.

Maybe I'll pick up another half dozen colors for the project? One can hope?

You know what? There have been several other times in the last couple days in which I went to look for something I thought I'd stored in my note ap and not found it. I thought maybe I'd not put it in the place I thought I had or named it what I remembered. But now I'm wondering if maybe I forgot to do a final save before I closed the ap when I did a restart. Now I'm wondering what else I might be missing that I thought was safely stored for later as I'm constantly copy/pasting links, info, thoughts and etc into my WhizFolder ap.