DMC 918 — Dark Red Copper

Copper as a metal goes through a visible aging process that most metals don't: it starts bright and reddish, oxidizes toward orange and brown, and eventually verdigris into green. DMC 918 Dark Red Copper captures the earliest stage of that aging — not the bright fresh copper of a new penny, but the color of copper that's been handled and warmed, slightly darkened, the red deepened toward brown without losing its essential metallic warmth. It's the color of old pennies in a jar, of a copper-bottomed pot that's seen some use, of autumn bark on certain trees.

In the DMC copper family — running from DMC 918 (Dark Red Copper) at the darkest through DMC 919 (Red Copper), DMC 920 (Medium Copper), DMC 921 (Copper), and DMC 922 (Light Copper) at the lightest — 918 anchors the shadow end. It's substantially darker than 919, dark enough to function almost as a neutral dark anchor in warm-toned designs. At #7E3010, the red-brown combination puts it in a territory that also relates to earth tones, terracotta, and the darker members of the DMC brown family.

Where 918 Fits in Nature Subjects

Animal subjects in particular depend on threads like 918. Fox and red squirrel designs use it for the deep shadows in the fur, where the warm red-orange coat gets fully shaded away from light. Autumn bird plumage — robins, wrens, certain finches — often has warm russet-brown elements that land exactly in 918's color range. Deer and other ungulates with tawny-brown coloring use 918 in the darker shadow zones of their coats, typically paired with DMC 433 (Medium Brown) and DMC 435 (Very Light Brown) for a complete fur-shading palette.

Rustic and folk art designs — the kind that depict traditional crafts, farm tools, stoneware pottery, or historical domestic objects — find 918 equally useful. The color reads as aged, well-used, and unpretentious in a way that more chromatic reds and oranges don't. A cast-iron skillet rendered in cross-stitch would use 918 for the warmest highlights on its black surface; a terracotta pot would use it for the deepest shadow zones beneath the rim.

The Copper Family as a Design Tool

One of the most underrated things about the DMC copper family is how well it spans the gap between the red family and the brown family. Where the gap in many thread collections creates awkward jumps, the 918–922 sequence provides smooth transitional values that design software can exploit for complex organic subjects. Autumn foliage is a good example: the transition from warm orange-red leaves through the tawny brown of dried leaves and into the deep brown of bark requires exactly the value range that 918 through DMC 433 can provide.

For stitchers who work on portrait and figure subjects that include skin tones with warm undertones, 918 occasionally appears in the darkest shadow zones of warm-toned complexions. It's not a primary skin tone color, but as a deep shadow accent in tanned or warm-olive skin rendering, it can be more harmonious than DMC 3371 (Black Brown) in designs where a warm-chromatic shadow is more accurate than a neutral dark.