My current project is editing ThreadworX floss sample photos like this beauty here:
This is ThreadworX 10585, called Green River and for good reason. It’s a lovely mix of forest, dark grass, and emerald greens. The floss in its skein looks like this: 
and it’s beautiful! However, floss in a tidy skein doesn’t always represent how the colors will look when they’re used in a project. In an effort to help my customers and myself see these colors better, I decided to stitch samples of the ThreadworX flosses. I’ve done this over the years as I started with 24 colors in 2017 and added more very gradually. There are now 285 ThreadworX floss colors (as of August 2024). Most likely, the first one I stitched was my most popular color, ThreadworX 1154, called “Bradley’s Balloons,” shown here:
If you’re curious, each sample square uses four one-yard lengths of two strands each. Each sample takes roughly 2.5 hours to stitch, so 285 squares makes… 713 hours spent just on stitching (I surprised myself once I did the math – wow)! Of course, this was spread over the years 2019 to 2023, so I was able to work on other projects in between working on these beauties. Still, 713 hours is a significant investment in time!
After they’re stitched, the next step is to photograph them. This is not difficult, but it takes some time, say 2 minutes each. That’s another 10 hours.
Then comes the VERY tricky part – photo editing. One would think that with a decent light box and good LED lighting, the photos wouldn’t need much editing… and there you would be incorrect. The before and after photos for the 10585 sample is this:
You could have the fanciest light box with the brightest lighting and the most elaborate camera ever, and you would still have to edit the photos. It’s a real tribute to the human brain that we can see a background as purest, brightest white, where a camera lens captures it most likely as it really is – a shade of gray. This is the before and after of another beautiful ThreadworX color – 10655 Big Sur:
This is ThreadworX 11051 – Golden Leaves
and ThreadworX 1145 – Gray Flamingo
Many factors can affect the photos including the type and direction of the lighting used and the camera (or phone) settings. Even the shirt color of the photographer can make a difference! To correct these issues, there exists photo editing software such as Photoshop, which is expensive, and Gimp, which is free.
Editing can take a lot of patience, and even then there are some colors that just will not turn out right no matter what you do. The best examples of this are deep, bright aqua blues. A cousin of mine, who is a full-time professional artist, confirmed this for me. I was asking him about editing colors and how some just don’t behave nicely. He suggested “aqua blues?” even before I mentioned them. Validation!
The sample below, for ThreadworX 11382 – Blue Swirl, is a perfect example of this. This floss is much more gorgeous and vibrant than the photo shows, and I must have spent at least an hour just to get this close. However, edit a photo too little and it looks wrong, edit a photo too much and it looks wrong as well. Sometimes you have to settle for “as close as I can get it.” Very frustrating!
Fortunately, most colors edit much faster than this troublesome critter. If it takes somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes for each sampler, say, 7.5 minutes, there’s 36 hours of photo editing, in addition to the 713 hours of stitching and 10 hours of photography. One additional chunk of time necessary is about 3 hours spent cutting all of the 285 pieces of Aida fabric. That gives a grand total of roughly 762 hours for this ThreadworX floss sample photos project. Yowza!
Next time you see an online shop or a catalog with a zillion different items beautifully photographed, be they threads, jewelry, buttons, beads, clothing, furniture, antiques, anything really, I hope you now have a little more understanding of the time and effort involved in the images! One of my favorite catalogs just to look at for the quality of their photography is Sundance Jewelry. I’m not plugging their products, but I think their staging and photography is sublime.