Tufting Has No Colour Language. We're Building One

Ask a tufter which red they used and you'll get a photograph.

Not a number, not a name — a photo, held up next to a shelf, with "it's this one, roughly." That's the state of colour in tufting, and everyone working in the craft has quietly built their own workarounds around it.

We're building a numbered colour system to close that gap. This post explains what it is, how the numbering works, and — the part that matters most — why it only works if it doesn't belong to us.

What's actually missing

Every mature craft has a shared colour language. Paint has Pantone and RAL. Thread has DMC numbers that have been stable for a century. Knitting has yarn weights and standardised shade cards.

Tufting has none of it. What it has instead:

You can't specify a colour. A client asks for the same rug in a different blue. Which blue? You send a screenshot and hope.

You can't reorder reliably. The cone ran out mid-piece. The supplier's listing photo looks close. It arrives and it isn't.

You can't share a palette. Someone posts a rug you love and asks what they used. The answer is a supplier link that works in one country and a colour name invented by that supplier.

You can't design against reality. Software flattens your image into six clean colours. Those are screen values. Nothing connects them to a cone you can buy.

Each of these is survivable on its own. Together they're the reason colour decisions in tufting happen at the shelf rather than at the design stage — and why so much of the craft's collective knowledge can't be passed on. A tutorial can tell you the technique. It can't tell you the colour.

What we're building

A numbered colour library for tufting yarn. Each colour gets a code, a defined position in colour space, and a physical reference.

The first release defines 200 colours, anchored on shades that already exist as physical yarn and extended to cover the rest of the wheel. Three principles shaped it:

Every colour is distinguishable in yarn

Screens can show millions of colours. Yarn can't, and neither can your eye once the colour is fibre with a nap and a shadow. A library full of shades nobody can tell apart isn't precision — it's a source of wrong orders.

So there's a minimum distance between any two colours in the library, measured in CIELAB — the colour space designed so that equal numerical distances look like equal visual differences. Anything closer than the threshold doesn't get its own number. If two colours in the library look the same to you, one of them shouldn't be there.

Every colour is dyeable

A colour space contains plenty of colours that no dye will produce on acrylic or wool — very light and very saturated at once, or near-black but vivid. Including them would mean numbers that can never be filled by an actual cone.

The library is filtered to what yarn can physically be.

Coverage before density

Production ranges tend to grow unevenly. Warm tones multiply because they sell, while blues, purples and neutrals stay thin — not a mistake, just how a catalogue accumulates when nobody is planning the whole wheel.

A library built for the whole craft can't work that way. It has to hold skies and denim and deep water, and it has to hold the greys, creams and off-whites that form the background of most finished work. So the library was built outward from the gaps rather than by adding more of what was already easy to find.

How the numbering works

A colour code is one letter and two digits: R01, B07, N12. In formal use it takes a prefix: CFC-R01.

The letter is the colour family:

Within a family, numbers run by hue and then by lightness, so codes close together are colours close together. B03 sits near B04; it won't be a red.

Two rules matter more than the format itself:

Numbers are permanent. A code, once assigned, belongs to that colour forever. New colours are appended to the end of their family — a new blue becomes B16 — never inserted, never renumbered.

Discontinued colours keep their numbers. If a shade stops being produced, the code is marked discontinued and retired, not reused. A tutorial written in 2027 will still mean what it says in 2035.

These sound like housekeeping. They're the whole thing. A numbering system that gets reorganised is worse than no numbering system, because it silently breaks every document that referenced it.

Why it can't be our catalogue

Here's the part we want to be direct about.

We sell yarn. The obvious move would be to number our own range, call it a standard, and let the numbering quietly become a reason to buy from us. Plenty of companies have done exactly that, and it works — for the company.

It wouldn't work here, for a simple reason: a numbering system that only describes one company's products isn't a standard, it's a product list. The craft already has hundreds of those. What it doesn't have is a way for two makers who buy from different suppliers, in different countries, to talk about the same colour.

So the codes describe colour, not product. CFC-B07 is a position in colour space with a defined tolerance. Any yarn from any manufacturer that falls within that tolerance is CFC-B07 — whether we sold it or not, whether it's acrylic or wool, whether it's tufted by a machine or a hand-held gun.

That's a worse business decision in the short term and the only one that produces a standard in the long term. We'd rather the craft had a colour language than that we owned one.

What it changes in practice

Designing. A design carries codes rather than screen colours. The palette you chose is the palette you can buy.

Buying. Software outputs a materials list — codes and quantities. You order from that instead of holding a photo up to a listing.

Sharing. A pattern travels with its colours attached. Someone in another country with a different supplier can make the same piece, in the same colours, without asking you a single question.

Selling. A client picks from numbered swatches. A repeat order is a code, not a negotiation.

None of this is exotic. It's what every other craft has had for decades.

Where it stands

The 200-colour library is defined, and a first production batch is already spun and dyed. The rest is rolling out in stages — dyeing physical samples across the full set and photographing them under controlled light, because a colour standard that only lives as a hex value isn't a standard. Screens disagree with each other, and none of them agree with fibre.

Which colours get produced next isn't our decision to make in isolation. Studio records the codes people search for, add to a design, or hit as unavailable — so the shades in demand surface on their own, and those are the ones that go into production first. If enough people are reaching for the same blue, that blue gets made. The library defines what a colour is; the craft decides what gets spun.

After that: publishing the specification, integrating the codes into Craftphilia Studio so designs carry them natively, and — the part that decides whether any of this matters — getting other people to use it.

That last one isn't something we can do alone, which is the point.

If you tuft, we'd like your view on it: which colours are missing, where the families should divide, what would make you actually use codes instead of photographs. That conversation is happening in our community group, and it's open to anyone who tufts — machine, gun, or otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to buy Craftphilia yarn to use the codes?

No. The codes describe colours, not products. Any yarn that falls within a code's tolerance carries that code regardless of who made it.

Why 200 colours and not more?

Because every colour has to be distinguishable from every other one in actual yarn. Past a certain point, adding shades produces codes that look identical on the frame and cause mis-orders rather than precision. The library grows when a genuine gap appears, not on a schedule.

Are all 200 colours available to buy right now?

The library defines 200 colours; production rolls out in batches. A first batch is spun and dyed, and the rest follow in stages. A code exists as a standard whether or not we happen to stock it — and any yarn from any brand that matches it carries that code, so you're never limited to what's on our shelf.

What if the colour I need isn't in production yet?

Ask for it. Studio tracks which codes people are searching for, designing with, and finding unavailable, and the shades with real demand behind them go into production first. Requesting a code isn't a wish sent into the void — it's the mechanism that decides what gets made next.

What happens when a colour is discontinued?

Its code is retired, not reused. Anything that referenced it still means what it meant.

How is this different from just using hex codes?

A hex value is a screen colour. It tells you nothing about whether a dye can produce it, whether the result is distinguishable from the shade next to it, or where to buy it. A colour standard is a hex value plus a physical reference, a tolerance, and a name that survives.

When can I use it?

The codes go into Craftphilia Studio alongside the software release, and the specification will be published openly. We'll post here when there's something to download.