Part of the embroidery design process is choosing color options. This aspect of designing a needlework project from scratch can be a stumbling block for many people – including me!
If you find choosing colors for needlework intimidating or difficult, you are not alone! Still, my most basic color-choice guideline when people ask me about colors, is this: it isn’t rocket science. There’s no hard-and-fast rule. The colors you choose for your own personal needlework projects should be, overall, colors that you like, that please you, that make you happy.
If they’re not, you’re going to fall out of love with your project pretty quickly.

While there are many approaches to color theory in art, and while there are many approaches to color combining – sometimes to the point that it almost seems like scientific law – the fact is, color choice often boils down to a personal preference, guided by certain tried-and-true considerations.
Here in the studio when conceiving a project, we pretty much work by trial-and-error, letting our preferences guide us and then fine-tuning from there.
The first thing we do is work the design until we get a usable (though still open for tweaking) design, in vector format, ready to transfer for testing.
We print it on paper and we break out either colored pencils or water colors or water color pencils, or sometimes even markers – Copic markers can be fun to work with – but pretty much whatever coloring medium we want to use ends up scattered on the table.
Mostly, I prefer colored pencils. I like Prismacolors, probably because I’ve used them all my life. They’re easy.
And I’m lazy. (There. I said it.)
Seriously, though, they do what I need them to do, and I enjoy using them. My advice: use whatever coloring medium you like, that will give you a general idea of where you’re going. You do not have to be a watercolor artist to figure out your color schemes, shading, and so forth.
Once we’ve colored up some options and played around a bit with colors, we pull threads that may work for the various options we’ve come up with.
Or Don’t!
Alternately, you can skip testing colors this way altogether!
If you have an idea of a color palette you want to use and you have some threads on hand to pull from, pull away! Take out your threads, set up your project, and start stitching.
Work with the thread colors you have on hand, that you like, that you think will work.
As you stitch, if you decide you don’t like them, you can change them! It’s only thread.
And Time.
Ahhhh, yes. Time. If you’re designing with the intention of sharing with others, then Time may be more of a consideration for you, as it is for me and Anna here at work. While we do test stitch and make changes as we go on pretty much every sing project – it is inevitable – it saves us time to play with color on paper first.
Tweaks and Adjustments
Once we decide on a basic palette to start with, we broaden it by adding at least a couple greater contrasts, making sure we have a few deeper tones available to work in where necessary, and by having a few neutrals on hand that work well with the palette.
We might not use all the threads we pull. In fact, for small projects that I intend to share with you, I generally like to keep the palette at 12 or fewer colors, if possible. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule and it really depends on the project, but for small projects, 12 seems to be a good number. We often end up using fewer colors than that.
So that is how we go about our first approaches to color with any new project.
Our next step after coming up with a few workable palettes is to set up a few test projects. We test stitch a part of the project or the whole project to see what we like best and to make changes in the design and the colors if we need to before we get Really Serious and execute the whole thing for good.

Thanks Mary – This is helpful! Do you have a mapping of Prism Color Numbers to 6 strand cotton floss DMC codes? I find this is the most difficult part….I can find beautiful color palettes online but then can’t find up to date mappings of hex codes/Pantone/other to 6 strand cotton floss DMC codes or Au Ver à Soie 7 Strand Silk Alger Thread. Since I don’t have a huge library of threads to pull from and don’t want to invest in an entire set of threads I need this digitized conversion spreasheet. Thanks for your additional help!!!! Michele
I use real thread color cards, which have pieces of the real thread on them. That way, I can color match very closely to come up with the thread number.