Sublime Floss – Thread Review

Updated March 22, 2019
Sublime Stitching has a line of 70 embroidery flosses. They are packaged in 6-skein collections. Eight of these have all solid colors. One collection, Taffy Pull, has all variegated colors. Another collection, Mingles, has pre-blended colors that are three strands of two colors combined. Christmas Tree has four solids plus gold and silver. On Sublime Stitching’s site the collections are currently (March 2019) $6 each plus shipping. The threads are only available in collections.

The ornament pictured here was stitched almost entirely in Sublime Floss. Mingles in green was used for the edges of the ribbon. The green variegated was used for the Smyrna Crosses. Solid shades were used for the package and for the middle green shades on the ribbon.

The coverage in 13 mesh was excellent. Six strands covered the painted red squares and the blue ribbon completely. I was also intrigued by the Mingles idea, but this is something you could do yourself easily. It is also of somewhat less value if you use fewer than six strands.

This floss is made in China of Egyptian cotton in 8.75 yard skeins. This was my first time using Chinese floss. The quality was disappointing. Strands often shortened as I was stitching, coming out of the needle. I could not correct this and could not find where the thread had shortened, even though often the difference was 1/2″ or more.

The thread tangles more than other kinds of floss. When it tangled or knotted it was far more difficult to untangle than other flosses.

Embroidery floss usually is packaged in pull skeins. Although I used five different skeins on this project, three of them had problems. In one the end was turned under and glued to the wrapper. In the other two the end was hard to find. On one of these I had to pull the tags off and shake the skein to find an end. I rarely have this problem with other brands of floss.

I think some of these problems stem from the quality of the strands themselves. They are slightly thinner than the leading brands. They also seem stiffer. These qualities combined would cause many of the problems I had.

While these difficulties might not be significant in other forms of embroidery, they are significant for needlepoint. The combination of poor quality, limited color selection, and lack of single skein availability makes them an expensive and poor choice for needlepoint. I would just go out and buy another brand such as Valdani, Finca, DMC, or Anchor.