What is the real name of the bundle of color chips that decorators use to pick colors? Long rectangular pieces with each color from light to dark? All attached together at the top with what usually looks like a binder ring?
Anyone?
And where do you buy them?
Just bought my first house and want to make note of what colors the fixtures are since they a re hard to take to the store and I can’t seem to get it right. Also plan to make note of all colors used for future shopping reference!
Swatches, right?
I think you can get them anywhere that sells paint.
What about those straps that you clip onto the bottoms of your pants to keep them inside your boots? Do you know what those are called, by chance?
Or those things that you use to separate your toes when you’re painting your toenails?
Swatches, I was told at the paint store are the single strips they have 20 million of on the display. They understood what I wanted but said they didn’t have them and didn’t know where to look for them. Is there an interior decorators supply store???
Um… No. I have no idea what you are referring to.
Congratulations on the house dragonlady!
Where is Ty Pennington when I need him?
And OH BOY do I need him…
for the house! Yeah, that’s it!
If you are referring to swatches held together with a brad-type devise, it’s called a paint deck or a fan deck.
ETA: picture
PERFECT!!!
And where can I aquire a paint deck???
You can do one of a few things:
You can contact the specific paint manufacturer and ask if they will give you one. I am in architecture and interiors departments always had a ton. Now, then chances of them giving you one is slim- they tend to be industry things. I’ve never tried so I don’t know.
You can buy a Pantone color swatch set at any art store but they are pretty pricey for what your use is.
If you want my suggestion:
Go to a paint store and take the swatches that are near your colors. Take them home and then return the ones that don’t match.
Or, call an architecture firm with an interiors deptartment and ask if they have any they are going to discard. We often got new ones and got rid of old ones. This said, the economy being what it is, sales reps were not doing this as they used to.
If you go to the paint store and just ask for a swatch deck, they may just give you one. We had no trouble at all getting one a couple years ago.
Strangely, the thing does not hold samples of all of their pre-defined colors. We wound up needing to make our own custom deck by taking one of every swatch card for a particular color collection.
They’re called “blousing straps” or “blousing bands” where I come from (and in the packages at the on-base PX at the defunct Air Force Base in Corapolis circa 1995).
I would think of them more as stirrups…we use boot bands for blousing pants over the top of our boots
I wonder if we’re visualizing different things. They had boot bands, which were elastic green thingers for blousing over top without tucking in, and then they had these black ribbony things that as far as I could tell were for tying the pants to your ankle so they’d stay in your boot.
I see what you mean, we were definitely thinking of different things!
You could also buy straps the clipped to the bottom edge of your shirt and ran down the leg of your pants to the top of your socks to keep your shirt tucked in and your socks pulled up at the same time! Life was tough before BDUs.
I bought my fan deck on ebay a few years ago. I just looked, and there is only one on sale there now, linky. The starting bid is $9.99 with $7.99 shipping & handling – which is comparable to what I paid for mine. The one on sale is a Benjamin Moore deck which looks like it sells for $24.95 (don’t know s&h) on their website, linky. I love mine, but I can see where people might not want to pay for one…
We’ve always just picked the various cards that had the colors we were interested in, we didn’t need the whole deck. We knew that we were gonna paint the back bedroom some shade of blue, for instance, so we didn’t bother picking up green or purple or orange chips. Then we sat down and passed the cards back and forth, arguing about colors.
The cards have always been free as far as I know.
I have three decks of swatches that I bought at the thrift store for $1 apiece.
