Ever get a crazy idea, and then do it?
I was tired of ordering (and returning) Maxi-Lock serger thread (Tex-27 and Maxi-Lock stretch) because it wasn’t anywhere close to the color pictured on the website. Wawak was kind enough to send me a printed sample card, which was closer than online, but it still wasn’t accurate enough. I was tired enough of it that I ordered one cone of every color so that I could make my own sample card, and sell enough of them to get my money back for buying all of those cones.
Turns out – it totally works! My initial method used my embroidery machine on Kona cotton to embroider the names and numbers of the different threads. But unfortunately, it took an hour and a half just to machine embroider the text on one card, and then another couple hours to stitch out the actual color samples. Nope. So I ordered some canvas from Spoonflower with the text printed on there for me, and so all I had to do was add some stabilizer and stitch the color samples on. To do 76 color changes, I timed it would take me about one hour (without any stitching; just threading my machine 76 times.) So, I could work on these cards in batches to eliminate how many times I needed to rethread. I had 45 cards printed, and so I decided to do them in batches of 15. It takes me about 10 minutes to stitch one color across 15 cards. Multiply that by 76… plus the prep time with stabilizer and ironing, etc…. yeah I’d rather not do the math either. It’s still a LOT of time that went into these cards, and at $35 each I am definitely not making up for my time. But, I like to think that I’m doing a favor for 44 other stitchers plus myself to have an awesome reference card and never need to return their thread again ?
I’m unfortunately sold out of these for good, but below are reference photos taken in natural light to be as accurate as possible for you use if you weren’t able to snag one. Good luck!
