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:
purple threads
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.
patent easy tray, white craft card
And here’s how the reds/oranges/yellows box is looking:
double decker thread storagestackable trays for thread
I do like it when an idea works. Wish me luck with the (much larger) box of browns, greys, and neutrals…
A few people have asked about how I store my embroidery threads, so I thought a brief tour of my collection might be helpful.
I use a wide variety of threads, from very chunky cotton yarns (mostly for couching) to very fine silks, and pretty much everything in between. I will write a post some time about the various weights of thread that you can get and what you can use them for. For now I’m focusing on how to organise thread. This jumble of blue threads doesn’t look very organised, I know. I guess all things are relative.
Blue threads
When I dye threads, I dye them in skeins. They look really pretty in skeins, but I find them difficult to use like that because they very soon get horribly tangled, especially if you keep them all in the same box. I find the only way I can make them useable is to wind them somehow. I went through a phase a while ago of winding threads from skeins into little balls, but these also get tangled quite quickly.
Skeins of thread
I used to use sections of plastic drinking straw for winding threads from skeins after dyeing, which works quite well if you cut a little snip in the ends to anchor the thread before you start winding. The straws were left over from the olden days before we knew how damaging they are, and I figured it was better to use (and re-use) them than to let them end up in landfill.
Drinking straw bobbins
Some of my threads are still on straws, but these days I tend to use little squares of regular 80gsm copy paper, about 3” square, and roll them up.
Squares of copy paper ready to roll
Again you need to snip the end of the paper tube so that the thread has somewhere to anchor itself to stop it unravelling. I find you don’t need to glue the roll of paper; the thread keeps it rolled quite securely.
Purples. That horribly tangled black thing (top left) is coton a broder and needs winding
I find it quite therapeutic to wind threads from skeins onto tubes, but it can take a long time depending on how fine the thread is.
Green threads. Some of these are commercial threads; most are hand-dyed cotton and silk
The only time I use the commercial card bobbins (the kind that you can buy from embroidery shops) is for winding DMC stranded embroidery floss. I don’t like these card bobbins much because when you get to the end of the skein the thread ends up with permanent creases from being wrapped round the flat edges of card. I find there is no other sensible way of storing these though – I can’t see colours clearly enough with them piled up in skeins, and you need to label them in case you need to buy that particular colour again.
DMC stranded embroidery thread
So there’s a little tour through my threads. I know lots of people who use sticks and twigs, and the old-fashioned wooden clothes pegs, to store thread. They look lovely, but I imagine would be bulky in large numbers. So – how do you store your threads? Let me know if you have any good tips.
