Have you been thinking of making a cross stitch pattern into Diamond Painting but the pattern contains number 1-35? You do not have to worry, even if these numbers are not available for Diamond Painting, there are similar shades you can use. How to find out which ones you can find out about in this post.
About DMC 1-35
As many of you probably know, DMC makes embroidery thread. This is what the new numbers are for. They were produced because they thought certain shades were missing. DMC started manufacturing them in October and November 2017. It became a completely new number series, with number 1-35. All previous numbers consisted of three or four digits. It has now been almost three years since the colors were released, they have been used in cross-stitch patterns a little now and then. Something that can turn into a little hurdle for us that do Diamond Painting, because these numbers are not used for this.
Replacement colors
One way to find a replacement color is to look at a DMC color chart yourself and try to figure out if there is any similar color. It may take some time, but it is not completely impossible. Another way, which I would like to say is very convenient is to use a tool that Thread-Bare has. They call the tool “Closest DMC Thread-Color Lookup Tool”. You can of course use this tool to find replacements for all DMC numbers and not just numbers 1-35.
How the tool works
It’s web based and all you have to do is go here: Closest DMC Thread-Color Lookup Tool. Once you are on the website, you can either click on the color you want to see the nearest color suggestion for or you can enter the number yourself.
If you enter the number yourself, it is done below the picture with all the numbers, in the box after where it says “Thread Code”. You can then select one of seven different algorithms to calculate the nearest color. Then it shows similar colors. The first color is the one you have chosen and then comes the one that is most similar. Then the second most similar to the original color and so on. As you can see in the picture below, DMC number 3819 is a pretty good replacement for DMC number 12.
One thing to keep in mind when using this tool is that colors are displayed differently depending on which screen you are looking at. So the shades may differ from reality. They also write that you should keep in mind that depending on where on the motif you are going to replace colors, you may need to think about whether a shade darker or lighter actually works. It also depends on what other colors are used around. So you need to think about how the whole painting will look like. Another thing to keep in mind is that it can get really crazy if, for example, you replace DMC number 12 with 3822 and you already have DMC 3822 on the painting. So keep that in mind when looking for a replacement color.
