03/11/2026
Come along on a journey with us…
What started as asking for a couple samples of Valspar’s Swiss Coffee, quickly turned into an educational, behind the scenes, in depth training experience about mixing paint!
Most, if not every time, you approach the paint counter and the sales associate will give ya what you ask for. This time, our now favorite paint guy, went above and beyond to explain why my two samples wouldn’t be the exact same colors. Which led to so many other interesting conversations about paint that we never thought to ask!
The short version is this- when the barcode on the paint chip is scanned, the computer determines which base should be used and how many drops of various colors need to be added to achieve the intended color.
The ingredients for Swiss Coffee are black, gold, and red. Working with sample sized jars, if you notice in the photo, we only need a tiny fraction of a single drop of each! A FRACTION OF A DROP!
This is where things get slightly jumbled.
The machine does a fantastic job overall, but some things just happen when working in such small amounts. Consider the last time the lines were purged, what residual paint may possibly drop into your color, and once the wheels start turning in your brain with all the mechanics of mixing paint- you’ll be mind blown! 🤯🤔
As we knelt down to look up at where the paint dispenses from, it didn’t take long to realize that not all three of our “fractions of drops” even dropped. If you look closely, you can see almost a full drop of red just barely hanging on up there. You can also see that in the jar, the gold dropped and the black (the third pin drop is splatter from the black), but not the red. When we did a second jar, a different arrangement of drops mixed. For the third jar, we finally had all three fractions of drops actually drop together.
So here is the takeaway- plan to start and finish a barn quilt with the same jar of paint. If you run out of Swiss Coffee and need to do touch ups at the end, chances are that the color will be slightly off. It may or may not be noticed, but we prefer not to take too many risks, especially when working on customer’s boards.
Now, we say all this to share what we think is valuable knowledge. We are not knocking our store or paint department. We absolutely LOVE our paint team and are so thankful that we were given the opportunity to learn more about the mixing process before we even start painting barn quilts! It really was so interesting!!!