dmc

The goal of dmc is to allow you to find the closest DMC embroidery floss colour(s) for a given colour, as well as access colour (hex, RGB) information about DMC colours.

If you’d like to use dmc without having to install the package (or R!), there is a Shiny app as well (in its own package, dmcapp).

Installation

You can install the development version of dmc from github with:

# install.packages(devtools)
devtools::install_github("sharlagelfand/dmc")

Example

Say I’m interested in finding the closest DMC floss colour for the background colour of the dplyr package’s hex logo 😈.

I can look up the hex code for this colour via a site like HTML Color Codes. The hex code is “#EE8726”.

Then, I can use dmc() to find the closest DMC floss for this colour:

library(dmc)

dplyr_background <- "#EE8726"

dmc(dplyr_background)
#> # A tibble: 1 x 6
#>   dmc   name            hex       red green  blue
#>   <chr> <chr>           <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 970   Pumpkin - Light #F78B13   247   139    19

I can choose to show more than one matching colour:

dmc(dplyr_background, n = 3)
#> # A tibble: 3 x 6
#>   dmc   name                  hex       red green  blue
#>   <chr> <chr>                 <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 970   Pumpkin - Light       #F78B13   247   139    19
#> 2 922   Copper - Light        #E27323   226   115    35
#> 3 721   Orange Spice - Medium #F27842   242   120    66

And to turn off the visualization of the colours:

dmc(dplyr_background, visualize = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 1 x 6
#>   dmc   name            hex       red green  blue
#>   <chr> <chr>           <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 970   Pumpkin - Light #F78B13   247   139    19

By default, dmc() uses Euclidean distance to find the closest floss colour. The method can be changed to be one of “euclidean”, “cie1976”, “cie94”, “cie2000”, or “cmc”. For example:

dmc(dplyr_background, n = 3, method = "cie94")
#> # A tibble: 3 x 6
#>   dmc   name            hex       red green  blue
#>   <chr> <chr>           <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 971   Pumpkin         #F67F00   246   127     0
#> 2 970   Pumpkin - Light #F78B13   247   139    19
#> 3 740   Tangerine       #FF8B00   255   139     0

If I want to go the other way and just find the hex/RGB information for a given DMC floss, I can use undmc(). By default, this visualizes the DMC floss:

undmc(c("Ecru", "B5200"))
#> # A tibble: 2 x 6
#>   dmc   name       hex       red green  blue
#>   <chr> <chr>      <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 Ecru  Ecru       #F0EADA   240   234   218
#> 2 B5200 Snow White #FFFFFF   255   255   255

Again, the visualization can be turned off:

undmc(310, visualize = FALSE)
#> # A tibble: 1 x 6
#>   dmc   name  hex       red green  blue
#>   <chr> <chr> <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 310   Black #000000     0     0     0

undmc() mostly just takes the DMC floss number, except in cases where there isn’t one (e.g., Ecru).

A full list of floss colours in the package is available via floss:

floss
#> # A tibble: 454 x 6
#>    dmc   name                hex       red green  blue
#>    <chr> <chr>               <chr>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#>  1 3713  Salmon - Very Light #FFE2E2   255   226   226
#>  2 761   Salmon - Light      #FFC9C9   255   201   201
#>  3 760   Salmon              #F5ADAD   245   173   173
#>  4 3712  Salmon - Medium     #F18787   241   135   135
#>  5 3328  Salmon - Dark       #E36D6D   227   109   109
#>  6 347   Salmon - Very Dark  #BF2D2D   191    45    45
#>  7 353   Peach               #FED7CC   254   215   204
#>  8 352   Coral - Light       #FD9C97   253   156   151
#>  9 351   Coral               #E96A67   233   106   103
#> 10 350   Coral - Medium      #E04848   224    72    72
#> # … with 444 more rows

where the values in floss[["dmc"]] are all that can be passed to undmc().