Thread, thread and more thread

Decades ago I used to do a lot of petit point, and I acquired hundreds of different colours of floss, which I kept in a 36 drawer storage box and I'm still working through the stash.

However, I'm noticing that in spite of having lots of colours most of which have several shades, I still don't seem to have what I want and the thread that used to cost $.30 a skein is now $1.50. That doesn't seem very costly until you consider how many colours you need to do a landscape. The last one used about 30 shades of blue and about as many of green and about 15 shades of brown and 15 more of beige. That's about 100 shades of colour.  

It's not just having that many colours, it's having 3-7 shades of some colours to get the variations right.

So I need more thread colours, but I don't really know which ones, just that I again have a lot of river, a lot of sky, a lot of grasses and reeds and flower leaves and tree leaves and rocks, lots of rocks. So in addition to the greens and blues I need lots of browns and greys. 

I went looking for thread and while I can buy lots of assorted threads cheaply, I don't like using cheap threads. The cheap threads are dull, coarse looking and rough feeling. The DMC floss has slick threads with a nice sheen to them. They're also more expensive and harder to find.

I went online looking for bunches of colours and found lots in groupings of home decor (what the heck is home decor colour?) or exclusive (!?) or popular colours (!?) or variations (!?) Generally these were packs of 36 colours for about $40.00.  None of these bundles seemed to have a lot of blues and greens and certainly not browns and greys. 

I finally opted for a pack of 100 random threads that, with shipping and taxes cost $163.00 which is a whole lot more than the thirty cents a skein I used to pay. It came today with 25 greens, 15 blues, 15 browns and a couple of greys along with 43 other assorted colours.

I used to split the threads between Coats and Clark Anchor and DMC. In petit point there were subtle shading differences between the two brands and some charts used threads from both manufacturers to get the best combinations. Then I sorted each brand into blue greens and yellow greens.

While the blues got sorted into red blues and yellow blues. Some blues lean toward purple and some toward green.

 Coats and Clark Anchor is gone, replaced by J P Coats and while I have some of their threads, I find that the quality of the floss has gone down the the thread has more of a dull finish than it used to. So I'm sticking to the DMC threads for a more consistent product.

There weren't a lot of browns and they ranged from beige and peach to chocolate and  bronze, while there were only 2 greys.

I'm not sure I can use my typical sorting practice and I think I'm just going to shove them in drawers sorting them into light and dark.

At least I have a few more options now, or maybe not, they might just be duplicates of what I already have, and wouldn't that be a bummer.