It’s Wednesday, which is my afternoon off, and I took a break from thread winding/labelling to attend to some – well – thread. Bit of a busman’s holiday perhaps, but my own thread storage system has been underperforming for a while and I do like to see things nicely organised.
Here’s my current purples collection:
They’re all together, which is fine, but they’re all in different formats. Some are on paper wraps, some are on bits of drinking straw, some are on reels and spools, and when you’ve rummaged around in the box a few times they get hopelessly jumbled and it’s not easy to find anything.
I had this idea to make stackable trays that would fit inside the plastic boxes (the box is about 6″ x 9″ and 2″ deep) so that the paper rolls would be better contained and stay in roughly a single layer.
A sheet of craft card, a glue stick, and some measuring, folding, and cutting, and it’s working pretty well.
The tabs fold onto the side edges, and then the sides fold down over the glued tabs.
And here’s how the reds/oranges/yellows box is looking:
I do like it when an idea works. Wish me luck with the (much larger) box of browns, greys, and neutrals…
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Looks good to me!! I try to keep my threads organized too but sometimes they get jumbled up.
it’s the jumbling that I find so trying. I’m hoping this will work as well as I want it to 🙂
Good luck! Yes threads take time to keep organized. Reminds me I need to do some of mine!
it’s very therapeutic I find 🙂
I feel so much better when things are organized
Looks nice and neat! That’s a good idea to organize by color.
best way, I find, though I have in the past tried other ways
I love to be organized and it looks like will be there soon, able to grab a color without wasting time shuffling through the bins. Good job!
I hope it works 🙂
I love your trays! I have also tried various ways…the one thing that I have come to ‘accept’ about myself is that I almost always will begin the search for something based on its color, so I have finally realized that most alternative methods of categorizing no matter how sensible they seem in my own mind, just do not tend to age well. I wish I could remember who said the following so I could credit them, but for me, it works best to live by (and remind the patient husband as well) that one’s storage system is only as good as its built-in ease of retrieval, or something like that. This goes for all sorts of stuff including one’s basic household organizing haha. Sometimes it really is best to dump everything out in a pile and just cull, followed by a good long inventory with a non-emotional eye. Then it’s ready to enjoy all over again 🙂 and bonus: the literal act of organizing by color is its own type of fun eye candy in my book!
I’m really looking forward to getting into my new work room when the house move happens because I will do exactly that – put everything in the middle of the room, weed through it all, and create a whole new storage/retrieval system from scratch. And yes, it’s never a chore when there are interesting colours and textures to handle 🙂
Looks great!
so far so good 🤞🏻
I forgot to ask…..what kinds of threads are you dyeing and what type of dye do you prefer?
Thank you, Karen.
I use Procion fibre reactive dye and a low-immersion technique, which uses less water and fewer resources than other dyes. I dye a range of silk and cotton threads.
Thank you.
What a big job!
Do you include machine thread too. I have my threads organised by type, silk, hand dyed, floss etc and as I buy more and more its becoming increasingly difficult to pull out all those of one colour. Your way looks a lot easier, can you tell me the size of your plastic boxes.
Thanks, Jan
I don’t use machine threads much but you can just see in the pictures that any reels or spools sit in a space behind the stacked trays. The boxes are designed for stationery so they are about A5 and A4 size (I think the dimensions of the smaller one is given in the post). Definitely helpful to have threads organised so you can find what you need 🙂
this calls to mind a game box that I subdivided with folded card stock compartments … such fun
it’s really great when you can make what you need instead of buying more stuff 🙂
That is looking very much more useable!
yes, just got to try and find time to sort the others now. Maybe a nice weekend job 🙂