DMC thread colours, explained

The numbers are not a spectrum

This is the thing that confuses everyone at first. 208 and 209 are neighbours — lavender, one shade apart — but 300 and 301 are not near 208 at all, and 3371 is nowhere near 337. The numbering grew by accretion as the range expanded, so consecutive numbers are often related and distant ones almost never are.

A few worth knowing by heart: blanc is white, ecru is the warm off-white, 310 is black, and 3371 is the very dark brown that does the work people expect black to do in portraits and animals.

Families and the shade suffixes

Colour names carry their own shorthand, which is worth learning because it is how you navigate a shade card.

• LT — light. MED — medium. DK — dark.
• VY LT — very light. VY DK — very dark.
• UL VY LT — ultra very light. ULT VY DK — ultra very dark.
• So 3325 Baby Blue LT and 322 Baby Blue VY DK belong to the same family and are several steps apart within it.

Dye lots, and why they matter

Thread is dyed in batches. Two skeins of the same number from different batches can differ slightly — usually invisible, occasionally obvious across a large block of one colour, like a sky or a background.

The practical rule: buy every skein of a colour for one project at the same time. If you do run short later, use the new lot in a different area rather than in the middle of the one you had already started.

How a pattern chooses a thread for a colour

A photo holds millions of colours and a chart can hold a few dozen threads, so something has to choose. Matching by raw RGB distance produces bad results — it treats a difference in a dark green as equal to the same numeric difference in a pale yellow, which is not how eyes work.

These patterns match using perceptual colour distance instead, which weights differences the way human vision does. It is why the chosen thread sometimes has a number nowhere near what you would expect, yet looks right on the fabric.

Other brands

Anchor and Madeira both publish conversion charts against DMC numbers, and most shops keep one behind the counter. Conversions are approximations: a converted palette is internally consistent, but a piece stitched half in DMC and half in a converted equivalent can show the join.

If you convert, convert the whole list at once.

Common questions

What do DMC numbers mean?

They are identifiers rather than positions on a scale. Consecutive numbers are often related shades, but the range as a whole grew over time and is not ordered by colour.

What is DMC 310?

Black. Along with blanc for white and ecru for warm off-white, it is one of the few DMC codes worth memorising.

How many DMC colours are there?

The standard Mouliné range runs to roughly 500 shades. The catalogue these patterns match against holds 457 of them.

What is a dye lot?

The batch a skein was dyed in. Skeins of the same number from different lots can vary slightly, so buy all of one colour for a project together.

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