Kreinik Color Selector

Are you confused by the colors in Kreinik’s metallics?

Do you wish you could look at similar colors side-by-side?

While shop owners, teachers and designers have color cards, most of us just get frustrated. Kreinik has come to our rescue with the new Color Selector Tool. It’s one of the best and most useful tools for stitchers on the internet.

The site goes well beyond a color card. With it you can find all the shades in all the sizes of a particular color. If you want to know if a particular color comes in specific size of thread, enter the number, you’ll know immediately.

The table includes product (size), number, name, shading order, and a photo of the thread. You can sort by any column, and more

Those columns pack so much into them. You can buy threads from the table. You can see easily how the different finishes affect threads. Are you wondering if there is a really pale shade of green? You can find out.

My favorite part of the tool is the shading order. Kreinik’s range of threads is so huge that you can shade with them, but with colors often numbered by finishes it’s hard to know what colors work for this. The shading order helps you. Each shade of each thread is assigned a number. The first digits indicate the size, for example all #8 braid ones start with 8, then with a three-digit number that indicates relative value within that thread’s colors. Because each thread has a different range of colors, the same thread color will have different numbers in different threads.

The color family column is the one you’ll find useful for searching for metallics for your project. Every thread is put into a family. These are you basic colors: red, blue, silver, etc. Threads with multiple colors in them have them all listed. In addition you’ll find some non-color terms here that can be important within these threads such as “pearl” or “holographic.”

I can only think of two things I’d like to see. I’d love to be able to limit my search to a specific size or two of thread. I almost said canvas type, but Kreinik is used for so many techniques that would be too limiting.

Finally I hope they make a similar tool for their lovely silks, because it would be similarly useful for these threads.