DMC Color Chart

How to use this chart

1. Shortlist by eye. Browse a colour family and note two or three candidate codes for each colour you need. Neighbouring swatches are sorted from light to dark, which makes shade steps easy to compare.
2. Check on a shade card. Screens emit light while thread reflects it, so a swatch here is a guide, not a promise. Compare the real skeins in daylight before buying a lot of one colour.
3. Keep the steps even. For shading, choose codes whose lightness steps look regular. It matters more that the set works together than that each thread matches one swatch exactly.

Turn a picture into DMC colours automatically

The photo to cross stitch converter shows the nearest DMC code next to every colour in your chart, and “Use DMC thread colours” snaps the whole palette to DMC in one click. In the Studio, the Threads tab lets you pick any code by number or name, merges colours that land on the same thread, estimates skeins and downloads a shopping list. The PDF key prints the codes so you can take it to the shop.

Understanding DMC numbers

DMC codes are catalogue numbers, not a colour scale: 3865 is not “more” of anything than 3864. Codes from the same family often sit close together (for example 3712, 3713 and 760–761 are salmon shades), and a newer range uses the numbers 01–35 (from 01, a pale tin white, to 35, a very dark fuchsia), so a numerical list mixes unrelated colours. That’s why this chart is grouped by colour family instead.

Names such as “Very Dark”, “Medium” and “Ultra Light” describe a colour’s place within its family. They are useful for shading: a three-step shadow often uses the Light, Medium and Dark versions of one family.

Source and licence

Colour data: craft-color-codes by MakeBead, licensed CC BY 4.0 and retrieved 2026-10-08. The dataset is cross-checked against three published tables; see Licenses. DMC is a trademark of its owner; this chart is an independent reference and is not affiliated with or endorsed by DMC.