Thread Storage...what do you use?

Steph,

I use the tool storage boxes that have 60 drawers each. I have 8 of them stacked in the closet in my hobby room. Every color has it's own drawer and everything is always easy to find. I tried the floss bag approach and kept dumping them out or things got put in the wrong place. No more.

Dawn

Go to the hardware store with a fresh skein of floss. Ask to see the hardware parts cabinets. When you find one the skein fits into more or less flat in the drawer, that's the one you want.

Since I have several brands of floss, I store in color order (ROYGBIV). A friend who has only DMC stores in numerical order. Up to you whether you want to buy enough cabinets so you have only one or two colors of floss per drawer or cram in as much as possible. (I think I figured you can get 15-20 skeins into each of the smaller drawers on mine.)

I've worried about any plastic storage since having to clear my Mother's house last year and throwing away so many things that had deteriorated inside bags.

My floss inventory shows about 4000 skeins of regular floss and lots of specialty fibers. When setting up my new craft room this year, I "liberated" a double dresser from the spare bedroom and use it for my floss and cross stitch fabrics.

Not wanting drawers full of floss in a jumble, I used some cardboard boxes that fit exactly into the drawer, fitting about six in each drawer. These were labeled with the numbers, i.e. 400-500. I can take a whole box out to search for something. The fabrics went into the larger drawers. My Krenik spools, silks and other specialty fibers are in a wooden chest about 24" wide and 18" tall and 10" deep.

Doing these two major projects (emptying Mom's house and making my craft room) taught me several things. Not storing anything in plastic was one and another big one was nothing inside closed containers you can't see through unless they are labeled clearly and stored in the same area as other items in the same catagory or those things disappear "forever"!! I found so many things Mom hadn't found in years simply because they were concealed in boxes. Moni ---- Posted via Pronews.com - Premium Corporate Usenet News Provider ----

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I dont recommend my method. I keep all my floss, unsorted, in a large plastic bag. When I kit up a project, I find each number I require by looking at each skein one at a time. Then I lay out the skeins on a tray in approximately the right numberical order. The order gets muddled up anyway. It works for me.

I have more than one storage system. With DMC I have the plastic Darice boxes,(sold in walmart, Joannes etc etc.) and have the floss wound on plastic bobbins. In theory, I have one of each DMC color stored this way. However, in real life, I have so many projects kitted up, and if I don't have the bobbin in my box, I get another skein out of the "super-box", wind it, and it resides with the pattern, fabric etc.When I actually finish one, and go to put away the floss I frequently find there is already one or two partials in my boxes, so I just add the new "leftover" with it. Is this clear as mud so far??

Now the superbox is a long skinny Christmas tree ( or decorations, don't remember which) box which I bought on sale after Xmas at Joanns. The lid is hinged in the middle, and is about 5 ft by 1 ft. I was on a shopping binge some years ago, and have 1000s of skeine. These are just stored numerically in baggies in the long box. Being that it is inside the house, and I access it quite frequently, it lives under the bed, it does not mildew.

Floss like WDW, GAST I make holes in the card, and put them on circular rings. I hang these on hooks inside the closet door.

Other odds and ends, I make a creative plan to store them. If you use Mill Hill type Beads , I strongly recommend the watchmakers boxes bought from Lee something company. These are small boxes inside a nice meta;llic tin. They stack up, and take little space.

I try to keep my stash listed on my PDA, so if I am in a store, see a sale, I can check what I already have.

More stash??? Just ask!! Actually, I decided I didn't need 10 of each color, and have downsized a bit by selling to other stitchers for nominal value at O&I Auction online

Gillian, using Google, because we are still in NH.in the RV.

So much for the rumor that all engineers are sticklers for order! :)

When WalMart clearanced last year, I bought mumble-mumble skeins of DMC. I have achieved Step One, they're now in three two-gallon Ziploc bags rough-sorted. At some point, I need to split the red/orange/yellow bag into those three piles and start putting it into the hardware cabinet. Meanwhile, at least it's in enough order that I don't have to dump out all three bags looking for a skein of 666.

Don't use bobbins - could never find the sense in spending time winding floss. Though, I know that was pretty much the only system for a long time, years back.

Personally, I use floss-away type little bags on rings. I ring the threads for a project, when that's done, the bags go back into sets by number for my Anchsor/DMC. My overdyes are ringed by color - as I don't really care so much about whose is called for, more I make my choices by color. Silks also are now bagged and ringed. Metallics are in plastic container - like a big pencil box. Heavier threads - like all my Watercolours - are ringed through their tags. Then the whole bunch of threads are in lidded bins/project boxes. But, basically - it's little bags. I like that it's easy to move things from a project, back to inventory.

Ellice

I keep mine in a Plastic Office drwawers cube ,, i have several and stack them in a little Tower of plastic boxes , which include seing threads moline , praline etc,, i have one drawer with a see through front in which i store the threads that are rolled on cardboard whole Skeins are all stored in one drawer etc,, other drawers hold my knitting Dps , circculars etc,,, mirjam

Lee Valley Tools. They have lots of nifty gadgets that can be used for needlework. I love their Sliver Gripper tweezers for removing waste canvas threads and threads from Hardanger projects. Apparently, they also have a great needle threader, too, but I haven't tried it.

Louisa

When I saw this thread, I had to leap in! I'm not usually given to flashes of inspiration but when I ran out of space in my craft drawers for my tapestry wool I had to look for something else. I couldn't afford any more drawers so first of all I used a couple of Really Useful Boxes but, although they held a lot, they were expensive. I don't know where the idea came from - probably from the desire not to chuck them into landfill - but I suddenly thought of all my old VHS clear cassette cases from tapes I had recently converted to DVD. On top of those, I had an entire boxful bought from

back before DVDs took off, to keep some of my tapes in. They're perfect! Not only can they stored vertically like books but they can be stacked horizontally too. The polythene cover means a label can be slipped into the spine for ease of reference and they hold loads! They hold a lot of my tapestry wool so I imagine they'd do really well for silks.

I don't think I'd use anything else now...

Hope this is of use.

rain x

That is brilliant.

I personally use "photo boxes" for my "specialty" fibers and floss away bags for DMC and for most WIPS/

Cheryl

What a great idea!! I love to recycle stuff. I have a slew of those boxes and was trying to figure out whether to toss them. Problem solved.

Lucille

And it would be fun to cover them with fabric or otherwise "decorate" them.

Cheryl (who doesn't need another craft project)

I spent a long time in the military end of engineering and manufacturing. The more creative "technically", the messier. Or the most anal about everything in just the proper spot. To the millimeter.

C

DH used to work in the hydraulics workshop at his air base. He showed it to me once before moving to a position in another part of the hanger. I've never seen such a tidy disaster area.

Becky A.

The hydraulics guys at Raytheon were always meticulous about everything in the right place or properly put away and did their level best to keep it "clean" but it always looked terrible.

C

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. Not that you should stop there :-)

I love the cassette box idea....really great!

One question though...what are floss away bags?

Stef

As in "Hesperus" - Wreck of by Longfellow? I think your Texas time maybe affecting your spelling ;^)

I've been in lots of different manufacturing and lab facilities, all doing mil spec work. Including working in one of the 2 lead DoD labs. It depends on whose lab it is and what they're doing. If your job was to set up an assembly process, then of course you'd want to do it in an orderly fashion. But, frequently for us R&D types, getting to the orderly process involves trial and error, things working and not.

One of the things that people getting actual engineering degrees generally have to learn in some basic statics class is being orderly, a certain way of problem presentation and solving. I've had advanced mechanics (Fracture Mechanics - to name one) where the prof would not accept your work, or would downgrade you if the presentation wasn't orderly. For problem sets, you have to learn how to do a kind of indented/outline form of calculations so that what relates in which step can be followed. So, if he couldn't make out your logic or your math - down grades. If your lab books weren't very clearly annotated, and orderly - so the process of indents, etc was clear - he wouldn't grade your lab, and you'd have to represent it.

When I taught Thermodynamics (at a school with high entrance standards, so to speak) I frequently would send back "0" on homework, with 2 days to redo it (and I was kind). It was amazing to me how many of the students taking a junior level course, and not an easy one, evidently just didn't get it about having to learn to present their thought process and work in an orderly fashion.

My DH is a 6-Sigma Black Belt guy, and teaches process improvement methods for the Navy. He's been in engineering integration, and management for a long time - integrating various discipline specialties into the big overall project. It's pretty interesting how they teach the 6-Sigma stuff. All about overall process improvement. Lots of the "brainiac" types or R&D guys don't want to be bothered, but DH's position, repping the Navy position, is that there are ways to improve manufacturing, fielding, etc so that work isn't duplicated, manufactucturing costs go down, etc. It's the latest take on sort of Quality improvement. In the 80's it was all Quality Circles.

Personally, I think you have to clean up and order your lab at the end of the day, or when the natural break presents itself. But, mentally and emotionally, I am a very precise person about work, math, details - OTOH, have always had a really messy desk. I think it's a rebellion.

Ellice