There have been a couple of posts about school colors lately. I do a number of rods with school themes, so I thought it might be interesting to tell how I do it.
First of all, you can usually get the official colors from the school web site. For example, it you want South Carolina's official colors you can google "South Carolina Colors". This gets you to here:
[
sc.edu]
The colors are always given in PMS numbers, which is the specific color on the Pantone scale. In this case, it is relatively easy since one color is black. The Garnet color is PMS 202.
Pantone Scale is the "official" color scale for inks in the printing industry but it also applies to thread colors. You can get an online chart here:
[
www.cal-print.com]
At this time, I like to use Prowrap Color Fast thread because there are a lot of colors and the Prowrap site gives PMS equivalents (P). There is a PDF copy of the Prowrap color chart on-line, though the one on Mudhole is easier to read. Here is the online version
[
www.proproducts.us]
In this case Burgundy 343 is an exact match for PMS 202. Most of the time this is not the case. If there is not an exact match, I get the P numbers from the Prowrap chart and go to the Pantone chart, find the exact match for the school color, then find the closest matching P rating on the prowrap chart.
For example, I built a rod for University of Florida. The official orange for UF was PMS 172. Visually, the two closest colors on the Prowrap chart were 216 Tangerine (P 1665) and 713 Sunset (P 158). I then go to the Pantone chart and compare these two colors to the official color of 172. In this case, the 216 Tangerine at PMS 1665 was the closest match and in fact was almost adjacent to PMS 172.
