An Autumnal Foray

A foray specifically into unfamiliar threads and hand conversion between thread types.

I bought five patterns from StitchingLand, mainly because when you buy five you get 25% off and honestly the hardest part of that was picking only five.

The first (and as of yet, the only) pattern of the five that I've completed is the Autumn Pagoda. The designer's CG preview of the pattern is down below, I think the way the colour scheme would appeal to me is obvious but anyway.

The pattern is made and charted using DMC threads, which I enjoy working with and have the full set thereof (more on this if I ever make the requisite post) but sometimes I do like to try something different. I first tried some automatic conversions that work on pre-defined pairs of equivalent colours but these didn't give me great results, particularly where I was using multiples from one DMC colour family and they matched up best with a single shade from Madeira's catalogue.

So, I whipped out my DMC thread colour card, then the Madeira shade card, and set about hand converting the pattern. This meant comparing each required DMC shade against the Madeira equivalents (of which there are fewer, Madeira offers a more limited selection of colours even in its cotton range, let alone the even more limited silk selection) to find the closest match.

Of course, when you're going between about 500 colours to maybe half that, you're going to struggle to always get a precise match so there's quite a bit of fudging to get the right colours in roughly the right shades and groups.

Hence why I've ended up with brighter greens and two more visually-similar shades of orange, but I like to think that my little experiment hasn't turned out too badly.

Certainly I found the Madeira threads very nice to work with. Their flat spiral packs are very easy to use and very portable too, keeping track of threads and leftovers is super easy because you can just tie your excess to the pack it came from.

I mean, I'm not likely to switch over permanently as I have all the DMC I need and it'd be wasteful and a pain to have to convert all my stash of patterns to Madeira. That said, I'm definitely open to using Madeira's cotton in the future. I already have their silks so that's a given but the cotton was nice enough that I'd go through the effort of converting another medium/small pattern to it any day.