Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Frugal and Convenient Thread Storage

I've been working away on the sewing room which IS almost finished, but I thought I'd show what I did with my thread.  My thread storage started out on one of those hanging things with dowels-- pretty, but the thread got dusty.  When the collection outgrew that rack, I upgraded to plastic boxes that would keep the dust out.  When the boxes increased five boxes requiring a constant and frustrating shifting of the stacked boxes to find what I wanted, I knew it was time to make another change.

 Until I can afford one of those incredible wood cabinets, here is my frugal but convenient thread storage solution.

 It's a Sterlite and I paid $14.  The four shallow drawers work well for all the smallish spools and the tall bottom drawer has my large cones of thread.  My old boxes had inserts with dowels for the thread which I was able to reuse in the drawers.   Otherwise I was going to line the drawers with that rubbery shelf liner to keep things in place.  I have so many spools they pretty much hold one another up.

I even marked the colors on the outside!!  See those nice little rectangles of color?

The first label on the top drawer is metallic for my metallic thread, but it doesn't show as metallic in the photo.  The last one is stripes to designate all my strange threads-- plastic, button, upholstery, that kind of thing.  The rest signify the colors in the drawers and the sides they are on.

So much easier to find what I'm looking for now.

I used my ever-helpful Xyron Magic Sticker Maker and EK Success Photo Labels paper punch along with scrap paper in the appropriate color.
Just slide labels into the back of the sticker maker:

And twist the knob to turn them into stickers:
The paper punch has 3 different size labels which will be nice for labeling the rest of the sewing room, too.  The sewing room is almost done--really.  I'd say I will have it up next week, but I remember how that worked out with the master bath.  MAYBE next week.

6 comments:

  1. Great idea. Thank you for linking up at http://diyhshp.blogspot.com I can not wait to see more great ideas next Monday.

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  2. That's a genius idea. The little stickers also help you easily find the color of thread you want to use. :-D

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  3. What a clever idea. I've always liked those wooden dowel displays I've seen but it hadn't even occurred to me how dusty one's thread would get. Yours is a much more sensible solution.

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  4. I too like transparent boxes for material storage, and the colour coding is a great idea! And wow, such pretty threads you've got. Yum!

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  5. Yikes - how organised are you! Impressive ;)

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  6. This article is very interesting. Maja

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