Discontinued or hard-to-aquire DMC flosses & what to replace them with.
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If you've been an embroiderer for some time you will know how excited the world was when DMC released it's set of 35 new colours in 2017. DMC don't add new colours very often at all so when these 35 new shades of mostly greys, purples and greens came out, there was a huge cry of joy as they filled some missing holes in peoples' collections.
Unfortunately, DMC haven't always just added colours, but they've removed and replaced colours. And patterns -especially old patterns that haven't been updated to reflect current stock- can still require these colours to complete. I wanted to help with this handy list of replacement, currently-available table of colours.
Discontinued DMC flosses.
| Old floss | Replace with |
|---|---|
| 504 | 3813 |
| 731 | 732 |
| 776 | 3326 |
| 781 | 782 |
| 806 | 3760 |
| 868 | 801 |
| 971 | 740 |
| 3773 | 407 |
There are also some DMC flosses that you can only purchase within a pack, and cannot easily obtain just a single colour on its own. In my opinion, it isn't feasable to keep buying a pack of 8 when you just need more of 1 specific colour, so here's a list of replacement DMC flosses to use instead of what the pattern you're creating calls for, if it's any of these numbers.
Hard-to-obtain DMC flosses.
| Original floss | Replace with |
|---|---|
| 3880 | 223 |
| 3881 | 164 |
| 3882 | 839 |
| 3883 | 722 |
| 3884 | 535 |
| 3885 | 312 |
| 3886 | 3685 |
| 3887 | 208 |
| 3888 | 3740 |
| 3889 | 445 |
| 3890 | 3766 |
| 3891 | 995 |
| 3892 | 740 |
| 3893 | 543 |
| 3894 | 907 |
| 3895 | 646 |
I hope this has been helpful! I have collated this information from other sources and honestly, I'll be glad to have this reference for myself, even if no one else finds it useful. Hah!
As an aside; the colours I've represented the replacements as are only an estimation, since dyed cotton and HEX codes (the colours your computer monitor use to display each colour you see) cannot be completely and exactly replicated. They're just there to assist.
Update 2024/09/26: Background colours of the "Replace with" cells now more accurately reflect the floss colour.
