Brothread 40 Color Thread Kit Honest Review: What Works and What Annoys Me

I bought the New brothread 40 color kit in November 2023, about six weeks after my Brother SE1900 came into the house. I had retired from the school office that June, I had a folding table set up by the upstairs window, and I had already gone through most of the small spools that shipped in the box with the machine. What I actually needed was navy, white and a soft pink for a baby blanket. The kit was the simplest way to get all three at once, plus a color chart I could pin beside the table. Forty spools felt excessive then. It does not feel excessive now, though I will be honest about why in a minute.

Here is the version of this review I wish I had found back then. Not the one where a box of thread fixes your stitching, fills your order book and makes the spare bedroom hum. The kit is thread. It is good thread. I still reach into it every week, three years on, and there is exactly one thing about it that annoys me enough to mention out loud. But most write-ups of a forty spool kit are done by someone who opened the lid, took a photograph and closed it again. This is what the box looks like after three years of towels and blankets.

How I Actually Use It

The machine is a Brother SE1900, a sewing and embroidery combo with a 5 by 7 inch embroidery field. I leave the embroidery arm on it almost all the time and take it off maybe once a month to hem a pair of Dale's trousers. That field size matters here, because it shapes what I ask the thread to do. I stitch monograms and names on hand towels and bath towels, fleece baby blankets for my granddaughter Lily and for friends at church, canvas tote bags and cloth napkins. I have never stitched a cap. I have never stitched a shirt I intended to sell. Nothing leather has ever gone under that needle.

The setup is the same every time, which is why I can tell you honestly whether the thread misbehaves. One sheet of HBI tear away stabilizer under the fabric, doubled for a thick bath towel. A clear water soluble topper on anything with a terry loop so the stitches do not sink. A generic pre-wound white bobbin in the case, never a colored one, because I am not going to match bobbins to forty spools and nobody sees the back of a towel anyway. The 4 by 4 Sew Tech hoop does most of the monograms, and a second 5 by 7 hoop means I can load the next item while the current one is still running.

Inside that routine, the New brothread spools have been unremarkable, and I mean that as praise. The thread feeds, the tension holds, the design finishes, I tear away the stabilizer and press the towel. In three years I have not had a spool snap mid design, shred at the needle or leave a nest in the bobbin area. When something goes wrong at my table it is almost always me. The hoop was not tight enough, or I forgot the topper, or I hooped a towel crooked because I was in a hurry before church.

Let me give you one specific afternoon, because general praise of thread is useless. It was a Saturday in February 2024, the light was good, and I was running eight hand towels for the church kitchen. I had hooped the third one and started a monogram in the New brothread navy when the design puckered at the bottom left corner. I stopped the machine, pulled the hoop off, and found the towel had shifted because I had not tightened the screw on the 4 by 4 hoop firmly enough. I re-hooped it, ran it again, and the second pass was clean. Nothing about the thread changed between the first attempt and the second. The variable was me and the hoop, and I have proven that to myself maybe a dozen times since. That has been the pattern for three years.

The kit is 40 weight polyester with 500 meters on each spool, which is a working amount rather than a sample. I want to be plain about the weight, because it is the number that matters most. Forty weight is the everyday embroidery weight and it behaves on the medium fabrics I use. It is not a specialty thread, and it does not claim to be. I have never run rayon through my machine, so I am not going to sit here and compare the two as if I had.

What Nobody Warns You About a Forty Spool Kit

Forty colors sounds like a decision that has been made for you. It has not. In three years I have used perhaps eight of the forty with any regularity. Navy. White. That soft pink and a light blue for baby items. Gold for a set of Christmas napkins. A deep green for a church banner. The rest sit in the box, sorted and patient, and they will probably still be sitting there when I stop embroidering altogether. That is not a complaint about the thread. It is a warning about the arithmetic. If you know you need six colors, buying forty does not make you a better embroiderer. It makes you the owner of thirty four spools of ambition.

There is one arithmetic I did not expect. The colors that run out first are never the ones you would guess. I assumed navy would go first and it did not. White went first, twice over, because white is the thread for the names themselves on most of the hand towels, and because a set of church napkins in July was white on white. The colors that sit untouched are the bright ones, the oranges and the lime greens, which look wonderful on the chart and have no business on a bath towel for a neighbor. I have pulled maybe three of them in three years, and both times it was for a child's blanket where a bright color was the entire point.

The second thing nobody mentions is that this is polyester, and the craft world has other threads in it. Polyester has a slight sheen to it that suits towels, totes and fleece just fine. It is what I would call an everyday finish. If you are chasing a soft matte look or a high gloss look, that is a different spool and a different purchase, and a forty color kit is not going to teach you the difference. I knew what I was buying because I had already stitched a few dozen towels. A brand new embroiderer might not, and the box does not explain itself.

The third is storage, and it is the most boring warning of the three. Forty spools is a real box, not a little tray. Mine lives on the rolling cart beside the table, sorted by the color chart so I can find navy without digging. If your sewing space is the corner of a dining room, that box will be visible and it will be large. I have an entire spare bedroom and a cart and it still took me a month to decide where it belonged.

Three years, three packs of tear away stabilizer, one hoop set and the same box of thread. The kit has never once been the reason a project failed.

Where It Genuinely Earns Its Keep

What I care about most is what happens after the gift leaves my house. The listing says the thread holds color through commercial laundering and bleaching, and I can only tell you what my own washer did. Lily's fleece blankets have been washed hot more than once and the pink is still pink. The bath towels I monogrammed for the church kitchen have been through a hot wash and a bleach load, and the navy is still navy. I am not a laboratory and I will not pretend a home washer proves a claim about commercial laundry. But three years of my own washing has not faded anything I can see.

The second thing is yardage. Five hundred meters on a spool means the colors I actually use do not run out in the middle of a project. I have never had to stop halfway through a set of six towels because I ran out of navy. That sounds like a small mercy until you have spent an evening trying to match a shade from a separate order, which I did once with the few starter spools I began on and will not do again.

I learned that the hard way in October 2023. I was monogramming a set of four bath towels for a neighbor down the street and ran out of the white that came with the machine on the third towel. The craft store twenty minutes away had one spool of white, in a brand that was not the same, and the fourth towel came out a half shade warmer than the other three. She was kind about it. I was not kind about it to myself. That is the exact situation five hundred meters on a spool prevents, and it is the reason I stopped buying singles after that.

The third is consistency. Every New brothread spool in the box behaves at the machine the way every other spool in the box behaves. I do not adjust tension between colors. I do not wonder whether one spool will stitch differently from the next. When you are running the same monogram across twelve napkins for the St. Peter's table, that sameness is worth more than anything printed on the label.

The fourth is the color chart, which is the part I underrated when I ordered. It is a printed card showing every spool in the kit, and I keep it in the lid. When a friend texts me a picture of a towel she likes and asks whether I can do something similar, I look at the chart instead of opening forty spools and holding them up to the window. That sounds trivial. It has saved me a great deal of standing in front of a cart with my hands full of fabric, deciding.

The Two Things That Annoy Me

Annoyance one is the puddling. I have four or five spools in my kit that will not hold their thread while the machine runs. The thread slides off the top and loops itself around the base in a loose pile, and if I am not watching, it comes up to the needle with a knot in it. The fix costs nothing. I drop a thread net over those spools and the puddling stops. I do not know why it is only some of them and I have stopped wondering. I just know that on those spools, the net stays on, and on the other thirty five it does not need to.

The worst offender in my box is a mid green that I use for church banners. The first time I ran it, I turned my back for maybe ninety seconds to answer a text, and by the time I looked up there was a pile of green on the cart and a knot at the needle. I cut it, rethreaded, dropped a net over the spool before I started again, and it has run clean every time since. Four or five spools in my kit behave that way. I have not found a pattern to it by color or by where they sit in the box.

Annoyance two is the sorting, and this one is entirely on me, but it is still a job the kit hands you. The chart is a card. It lives in the lid. Keeping the box arranged so the card is still accurate after three years of pulling spools out and putting them back is a small chore I signed up for by buying a forty color set rather than ten singles. Twice now I have found a spool two rows from where it belongs because I set it down in a hurry while the kettle was on.

Now let me be equally clear about what is not on this list. No broken thread in three years of stitching. No shredding at the needle. No surprise tension changes between spools. No lint building up in the bobbin area that I could trace back to the thread. No bleeding onto a white towel. I have read enough reviews to know that people have had those problems with thread, and I want to be accurate about the fact that I have not.

Who This Is For

This is for the home embroiderer with a 5 by 7 machine who stitches gifts, church items and small orders for neighbors, and who wants one box that covers the colors that actually come up. Navy, white, a pink and a light blue, gold for holidays. If you are making monogrammed towels and blankets for people you know, this kit will carry you for a long time and you will not think about it again. That is the highest compliment I can pay a supply. I think about my hoops. I think about my stabilizer. I do not think about this thread, and I have been using it since November 2023.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you already know your palette. If you stitch navy and white and nothing else, forty spools is a box you will store and never open all the way, and you are better served buying the two colors you use in volume. Skip it if you need a finish polyester will not give you. Skip it if your sewing room has no shelf or cart to spare, because the box is not small. And skip it if you are still in your first month at the machine. Work through the starter spools first. Learn what a bad hoop feels like before you buy in bulk, so that when a design puckers you know it was the hooping and not the thread.