Collecting colours

I've been enjoying building up a collection of as many different colours of tapestry wool as possible.

I'm someone who does tend to like collecting things whether it's Magic the Gathering cards, mini ornaments for my printers' trays or pieces of dichroic glass jewellery, so it was perhaps inevitable that I'd be a bit obsessive about it....

I realised from the outset that I needed to keep a record of what I'd got in order to avoid too many duplicates (and be aware of the duplicates so that they can be kept together). Initially the record was just ticking them off on a print-out of an Anchor colour chart but then I looked - in vain - for a spreadsheet or checklist to download.

As I didn't find one I've spent some time creating one (which I'd be happy to supply to anyone and may upload here once I find out how). It's got approximate photos of the Anchor colours, all the colour numbers (and a column to add the old ones if appropriate) and the names of each group of colours (eg my favourite name, Gobelin Green) - each with an appropriately coloured background for ease of reference.



As an at-a-glance accurate colour record for reference in picking colours, I'm also sewing a piece of canvas with just 25 stitches of each of my 200 or so colours - there'll be an accompanying chart of numbers.



Most of my wool has come in lots of 10, 20, even 50 full or part skeins from ebay - typically at less than 20p/skein inc postage. Mostly I haven't known exactly what colours I'm getting, which can make for a nice surprise when they arrive. But a special treat was to go to John Lewis in Norwich and spend a happy half hour choosing 15 or so actual colours from a big display. I've spotted some good online shops too - I'll be trying them for canvas.

Searching ebay for tapestry wool, I use the search string
(wool*,skein*) (anchor,tap*) -cotton -silk
in the ebay crafts category to find what I'm looking for.

I make a great deal of use of the advanced search capabilities of ebay - the * wildcard in particular is very useful - in this case it ensures that Tapisserie and tapestry are found as well as the plurals of wool and skein.

I think it's about time I gave up buying though - it'll take me a long time to use up the wool I've bought already at a rate of maybe 8 skeins per cushion and one cushion per two months...