r/scrapbooking • u/MiDankie • 2h ago
Tools v5.0 Recollections 65lb Cardstock Colour Swatch Book
What started as āI should make myself a little cardstock reference sheetā has become a 3 to 4 year project involving a colour meter, spreadsheets, Illustrator files, and a frankly unreasonable amount of cardstock.
I originally just wanted to know which shades I owned, have digital versions in Illustrator so I could design projects using cardstock I actually had, and know which packs to buy when I inevitably ran out of a particular shade mid-project.
Then people started asking: āAre you going to add all the packs?ā āWhat about the 12 Ć 12 packs?ā āAre you adding the new colours that just came out?ā
I kept expanding it, and apparently nobody in my personal life thought to stop my growing cardstock empire.
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WHATāS INCLUDED IN v5.0?
The free reference library now contains 19 pages, organized into three sections:
All Available Colours, 3 pages
A master colour legend showing each shade and every documented pack you can find it in. Because sometimes you already own that colour, itās just hiding in a pack with a completely different name.
8.5ā Ć 11ā Cardstock, 10 pages
The individual multipacks, Essentials, Bright Essentials, and solid-colour packs.
12ā Ć 12ā Cardstock, 6 pages
All the 10-colour palette packs, Bright Essentials, the shared Essentials reference, and solid-colour packs.
The individual reference sheets include HEX, RGB, and CMYK values, plus matching-pack references where applicable.
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HOW DID I GET THE COLOURS?
Over the past 3ish? years, Iāve purchased every pack documented in this library and measured the actual cardstock using a colour meter.
Iāve also physically compared and cross-referenced the cardstock across packs. These matches werenāt guessed from product photos or pulled from whatever colour someoneās monitor decided to display that day. There has been actual cardstock involved. So. Much. Cardstockā¦
Manufacturing batches can vary slightly, and screens and printers can display colours differently, so these are reference values based on the cardstock I measure, not a guarantee that every sheet ever manufactured will be identical.
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WHY IS THE MASTER LEGEND ARRANGED THAT WAY?
It follows a general rainbow order, but Iāve also deliberately kept similar shades and colour families together.
The lime greens sit together, the olive greens sit together, the darker forest greens sit together, and so on. The goal is to make it easier to compare related shades, not just create a rainbow and hope for the best.
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WHERE DO THE COLOUR NAMES COME FROM?
Most of the multipack colours donāt have individual shade names, so I identify them by their pack name and position in the pack.
For example, Apricot Crush 01 is the top colour in the Apricot Crush pack, followed by 02, 03, and so on.
The names identify where the cardstock comes from. The cross-references tell you where else that same shade appears.
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A HUGE THANK YOUĀ
A substantial part of this library was made possible by people who purchased the Colour Swatch Book Toolkit or donated to support the project.
That support helped me buy many of the packs needed to measure and compare the actual cardstock. This wasnāt simply me funding an increasingly elaborate paper habit by myself. You helped build this resource, and I genuinely appreciate it.
Buying an entire pack just to document its colours adds up quickly. Apparently, āresearch materialsā can also occupy several file folders.
This has been a staggering amount of work, but hopefully it saves you some of the āwhich bloody pack did this colour come from?ā detective work that started the whole thing in the first place.
Happy crafting!
ā MiDankieās Designs
