Margot de Paris: vintage needlepoint kits — the complete guide

Some needlework kits you recognise before you even read the label. A Margot de Paris canvas — the design printed in full colour, the French title stamped on the margin («Les coquelicots», «La licorne», «Chat»), the wools sorted by shade — has its own way with colour: brighter, bolder, sometimes gloriously unexpected. At our haberdashery in Valencia, Spain, we've spent years hunting down these vintage needlepoint kits and putting them back into circulation, and this is the guide we wish we'd found ourselves: what Margot de Paris is, how its references work, how to identify a kit and why they've become collector's pieces.

Margot de Paris: the house of colour

From the middle decades of the 20th century onwards, a handful of French publishing houses turned tapisserie — needlepoint worked in wool over printed canvas — into a domestic phenomenon that reached every corner of Europe through haberdasheries, department stores and mail-order catalogues. Three names come up again and again in sewing baskets and family inheritances: SEG de Paris, Margot de Paris (also signed Créations Margot de Paris) and Royal Paris.

All three shared the same simple, brilliant idea: the design was printed in full colour directly onto the cotton canvas, in a palette matched to the wools supplied with the kit. No counting squares on a symbol chart — the fabric itself was the pattern. As we like to say, stitching one of these canvases is painting with wool.

So what sets Margot apart within that family? Character. Alongside the timeless classics — florals, landscapes, pastoral scenes — Margot de Paris dared to do what few houses dared: animals in impossibly wonderful palettes (a multicoloured leopard, a technicolour zebra), abstract motifs, nods to Japanese art, and reproductions of the great medieval tapestries such as The Lady and the Unicorn. If SEG was the museum, Margot was the party.

Is Margot de Paris gone? No — and the nuance matters

Let's clear this up, because there's plenty of confusion out there: Margot de Paris is not a dead brand. Its canvases are still edited today and distributed through DMC's professional catalogue, where the brand keeps more than fifty active references under the antique canvas name.

What has changed — and it's the key to all the collecting around the brand — comes down to two things:

  • The old individual references are sold out. Every discontinued design of its era went out of production and was never printed again. When the last one is gone, it's gone.
  • The complete factory kit is no longer made. Today's Margot canvases are sold without wool: just the printed fabric. The classic kit — canvas + factory-cut and sorted wools + needle + instructions, all in its original packaging — belongs to another era.

That's why, when you find an old kit complete and unstitched, you're holding what collectors call New Old Stock: brand-new stock from decades past, impossible to reissue as it was. Not a copy, not a kit reassembled later with loose wools — the original, exactly as it left the factory 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

How to read Margot references (62, 72, 133, 152, 153…)

Margot de Paris numbers its designs in a series.design format: the number before the point is the catalogue series, and the number after it identifies the individual design. You'll find the reference printed on the packaging and, in small type, on the white margin of the canvas — usually next to the design's French title.

Each series groups designs of a similar format. These are the ones that pass through our hands most often:

Series Typical formats Example from our shop
62.x Elongated: 25 × 60 cm and 18 × 48 cm Mauve irises, ref. 62.174
72.x 22 × 30 cm Calla lilies and water lilies, ref. 72.2238
133.x 36 × 47 cm Cat, ref. 133.3562
152.x Large, up to 60 × 80 cm Woman with umbrella, ref. 152.43
153.x 40 × 50 cm Poppies, ref. 153.1370

The logic always holds: series = family and format, suffix = design. If your kit has lost its box, look for the reference printed on the canvas margin or the selvedge — it's the same number the packaging carried.

Collections and themes: from The Angelus to a multicoloured giraffe

Margot de Paris's historical catalogue is huge and surprisingly varied. These are the families collectors fall for first (and the ones that sell out fastest):

How to identify and date a vintage Margot de Paris kit

Inherited a kit, or found one at a flea market? These are the clues we use ourselves to confirm authenticity and estimate the era:

  1. The house signature. «Margot de Paris» or «Créations Margot de Paris» printed on the packaging, the label or the canvas margin, almost always alongside the design's French title.
  2. The printed reference. The series.design code (62.x, 133.x, 153.x…) on the box or the white margin of the fabric. It's the most valuable piece of information on the kit: it confirms the house and the series.
  3. The MADE IN FRANCE mark. Present on most period packaging and labels, it confirms original French manufacture.
  4. The wools and their colour references. Classic kits included tapestry wool, pre-cut and sorted by shade, with its colour references. Those bands and charts are gold: they identify the exact shade in case you ever need to replace a skein.
  5. The canvas. Cotton canvas in ecru or white, the design printed in full colour in shades matched to the wools, with an unprinted margin all around. A light, even ivory tone is the normal patina of the decades — not a flaw.

At our shop, every vintage kit goes through a 5-point check before it's sold (canvas and print, wools and colours, period marks, storage signs and completeness), and what you see in the listing is exactly what arrives at your door.

Why old Margot de Paris kits are collector's pieces

An old Margot kit brings together everything textile collectors look for:

  • A genuinely closed edition. The reference sold out and will not be reissued. Unlike a modern kit, there will be no more.
  • Contents that can't be repeated. The factory-cut and sorted wools, the needle, the instructions, the packaging… The complete set is what carries the value — and that format simply isn't made any more.
  • Growing international demand. On platforms like Etsy and eBay, vintage Margot canvases are listed as "rare vintage" and "new old stock", and those multicoloured animals fit beautifully into today's interiors.
  • A double life: project and object. You can stitch it (forty-year-old wools stitch beautifully) or keep it exactly as it is, as a piece of European haberdashery history.

Where to buy Margot de Paris needlepoint kits

Our Margot de Paris collection gathers original vintage kits, complete and checked one by one — many still in their factory packaging. If you're browsing beyond a single brand, you'll find all our needlepoint canvases on one page, and in our discontinued-finds collection we keep publishing the sold-out references we manage to recover. New pieces come in as we find them… and the most sought-after ones never wait around.

And if you're just starting out: needlepoint is probably the most forgiving embroidery technique there is. We walk you through it, stitch by stitch, on our needlepoint basics page and on our blog, Stitching tips.

Frequently asked questions about Margot de Paris

Does Margot de Paris still exist?

Yes. The brand is alive and its current canvases are distributed through DMC's professional catalogue, though today they're sold without wool. What is sold out and out of production are the old individual references and the complete factory-kit format — which is exactly why the vintage kits are one-of-a-kind pieces.

What does my kit's reference mean — for example, 153.1370?

The number before the point is the catalogue series (each series groups similar formats; 153 is usually 40 × 50 cm) and the number after it identifies the individual design. In this case, the Poppies at 40 × 50 cm.

Are Margot de Paris and SEG de Paris the same house?

No: they're two different houses from the same golden age of French tapestry, sharing the same technique (full-colour designs printed on canvas) but with their own catalogues and numbering. Today both are distributed through DMC's professional catalogue. You'll find the other house's full story in our SEG de Paris guide.

Can I replace the wools if a skein is missing?

In most cases, yes: with the kit's colour references (or by matching the shade against a current tapestry-wool colour card) you can track down an equivalent colour. If you're stuck on a specific shade, write to us — it's exactly the kind of puzzle we enjoy solving.

¿Prefieres leer esta guía en español? → Margot de Paris: historia, referencias y kits de medio punto vintage