Making a color card (embroidery floss mostly)

So you have some skeins of floss (or yarn or beads....). You might want to list which colors you have (there's an iApp for that: XStitcher); you might want to be able to look at the colors you have and decide if you need another, mintier, green. You might want to get a palette from ColourLover and match your craft material to it. You might want a set of Perfectly Christmas or Deep Forest or Slightly Gray But Not Too Depressed, Really, and you might want to go back to it some time later. 

Either a photographic one or a sample card made of the real substance (except for the beads, which you would have to set in epoxy or something) can be helpful. 

This arrangement of DMC colors is at least 25 years old, incomplete, and not in any order that makes sense to me, but I still use it to match unlabelled skeins and to loo over a bunch of colors quickly.

Step 1 Make a sample

Make a physical chip with a few inches (or cm) of your floss or yarn: it's easier to see if it's more than one strand wide, so trim it into four or five or six even pieces, and fasten it at one end with tape. It's easier if you use the kind of tape you can write on, or you can stick a tiny label on it. Write the company (if you use more than one brand of floss) and the color number on the sample.