Floss Toss: Combining Thread with Your Embroidery Fabric
What is a Floss Toss? Compare embroidery floss with your fabric and choose color, contrast and a beautiful monochrome effect.
A Floss Toss is a simple way to see whether your embroidery floss will stand out nicely on the fabric you want to use. Lay the colors from your pattern loosely on a few possible fabrics and take a calm look at what happens. This helps prevent a beautiful color from suddenly disappearing while you stitch.
You may recognize the term from the Stitchonomy Stitch Along Facebook group. The name sounds playful, but the test is especially useful before you place the first stitch.
How to do a Floss Toss
Choose a fabric you are considering for your pattern and place the skeins of floss on top. If you are comparing two fabrics, place them next to each other and divide the floss between them. Step back for a moment, look at it in daylight and choose the combination where the colors come through best.
Pay attention not only to the color of the fabric, but also to the feel of the material. A hand-dyed fabric can give a design extra depth, while a calm solid fabric lets the stitches speak very clearly.
Check the contrast
Look carefully for any colors that have almost the same value as the fabric. Those stitches may become less visible in the finished piece. That does not have to be a problem, as long as you are deliberately choosing that soft effect.
Take a black-and-white photo
Take a black-and-white photo of your Floss Toss with your phone. Without color, you can often see more quickly whether there is enough difference between the thread and the background. Especially with pale shades, gray and beige, this is a helpful extra check.
Also beautiful: monochrome embroidery
In a monochrome project, the fabric and floss are close together in color on purpose. This gives a calm, refined result. Choose floss that is just a little darker than the fabric, so your stitches remain visible without losing the tone-on-tone effect.
Want to play with color and texture? Take a look at hand-dyed embroidery fabrics on Etsy.
What should you look for during a Floss Toss?
Always look at your floss in daylight, and do not arrange the colors too neatly in a row. Instead, toss them loosely onto the fabric so you can see how light, dark and bright colors work together. Pay special attention to contrast: a soft pink shade can be beautiful on white fabric, but almost disappear on pale pink linen.
Choosing between fabrics? Place the same colors on two options side by side. For cross stitch, you could start with cross stitch fabric. For free embroidery, look at embroidery fabric.
Which threads should you use?
A Floss Toss works best with the actual threads from your project. If you use DMC, place the loose skeins or strands on the fabric and see whether the color has enough presence. Also browse the DMC stranded cotton collection if you still want to add more shades.
