How the Brothread 40 Color Thread Kit Ended Up on My Sewing Table

The thread kit was not on the list.

My list in October 2023 had exactly two things on it: a Brother SE1900 and a pack of tear away stabilizer. I was fifty-five, a few months into retirement from the school office, and I had not touched a sewing machine since I was a teenager. Embroidery was going to be one winter project, a handful of gifts, and then I would find something else to do with my mornings.

Then the spools that shipped in the box started running low. Navy went first. Then white. By early November I was down to a few colors that did not agree with each other and a fleece baby blanket for my granddaughter Lily that needed a soft pink name in the corner. So I ordered the New brothread 40 color kit. Forty spools, forty weight, 500 meters on each one, and a paper color chart. It arrived, I set it on the rolling cart, and three years later I have still never bought another spool of thread.

That is the plain account of how it ended up on my table. The longer one is that it quietly changed how I plan a project, and not for the reason I expected when I clicked order.

Forty weight, 500 meters on every spool, and a chart that tells me what I am holding without putting my glasses on. That is the whole pitch, and it turned out to be enough.

Here is what I actually stitch. Monograms and names on hand towels and bath towels. Fleece baby blankets for the babies at church. Canvas tote bags and cloth napkins for the booth I keep at St. Peter's holiday craft fair in December. Nothing with a cap frame, nothing leather, nothing I would call production work. One woman, one machine, a folding table by the window, and a cart of thread beside it.

What actually matters once the box is open

Thread is not interesting. I say that fondly. What matters is whether it runs, and the New brothread spools run. In three years one spool has given me trouble at the needle, and it turned out to be a dull needle, not the thread. No fraying halfway through a design, no fuzz balling up in the tension area, no spool that made me stop and rethread the whole machine from scratch.

The listing says the polyester holds its color through commercial laundering and bleaching. My test is more ordinary. The bath towels with navy monograms go through our own hot wash and a hot dryer, twice a month all winter, and the navy is still navy. The white name on a pink blanket has not gone gray. That is the kind of thing you only notice when it fails, and mine has not failed.

The one annoyance is real, so I will say it plain. A few of the spools let the thread slip off the top and puddle around the base while the machine is running. Three of mine do it. I slip a little mesh thread net over those and the problem stops. If that would drive you up a wall every single time, buy a pack of nets with the kit and you will never think about it again.

Bobbins are not a story here. Plain pre-wound white bobbins, a generic box, whatever is cheap that month. The kit does not care and neither does the SE1900.

The colors I reach for, in order: navy, white, a soft pink and a light blue for anything baby sized, then gold for the December towels. Forty sounds like more than you need. It is not. What it really buys you is the end of the mid-project drive to the craft store because a name needs to be in a color you do not own, and that happens more than you would guess in the first year.

Storage is a shallow box on the rolling cart, sorted the way the chart sorts them. The New brothread box stays square and stacks under the table when I need the surface back. I am not a spreadsheet person. I tried keeping a list of which spool was getting low and gave it up inside a month. The chart propped in the lid does the job.

The comparison I cannot honestly make

My friend Marjorie from church uses Simthread and showed me her set once, on her table, with her machine. I have never wound a spool of it and never stitched a design with it, so I am not going to sit here and declare one better than the other. What I can tell you is that in three years I have not had a reason to go looking for something else, and that is a smaller and more honest claim than a side by side.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you the machine matters more than the thread, and the person matters more than the machine. Nobody needs forty colors to learn. You need one towel you do not care about, two weeks of practice, and somebody honest to tell you that your first monogram will be crooked and that this is normal.

I would tell you to put the snips on the same order. The SE1900 does not trim jump stitches for you, so you will be cutting them by hand at the machine, and kitchen scissors are the wrong tool for it. Mine hang on a ribbon tied near the handle and I reach for them more than anything else on the table.

And I would tell you not to buy this kit expecting it to make you good. It will not. What it does is remove one small excuse to stop working on a Tuesday morning, because the color you want is already on the cart. For me that was worth the shelf space, and it is the reason the box is still there three years later, open, with the chart in the lid.