Hello all,
I was just wondering, what colors of thread was mostly used traditionally?
I and a lot of other leathermakers use a big variaty of color in our threads, but was was used traditionally for brown, tan and black leather?
What say you, Phil, you have read a lot of litterature and old book about leathercraft. What does the books say about thread and leather colors?
I found this box with, what they call "Classic colors": https://sajou.fr/en/n40-waxed-linen-thread-fil-au-chinois-capsules/681-waxed-linen-thread-capsules-12-classic-tones-3665546001569.html
By far it will be off-white, which is just raw flax linen. Yellow, brown and black are close behind. For as long as people have been dyeing leather, they have been dyeing thread. You can use the traditional aniline powdered dyes on both quite well. Many times I've not had the right thickness in the colour I want, so I've grabbed some white linen in the right thickness and dyed it with a leather spirit dye.
Oddly enough, grey and blue were popular choices to go with tan leather. You don't really see that anymore.