miscellaneous, sewing, sewing room

thread storage

My sewing threads are currently stored either on a plastic upright rack (reds, pinks, yellows, purples) or in a large plastic box (blues and greens) or on the small rack in my sewing cabinet (brown, black and white).  I have a lot of thread, and my current storage system is one that evolved rather than was planned.  But recently I became the proud owner of these threads as part of a bargain bulk buy with some other crafty friends.  There was no way that my current thread storage system – already overloaded and piecemeal – was going to cope with these.

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Now, that’s a LOT of Gutermann! It has been the motivator though to work out a better way of storing my threads. At first I wondered about getting my father to build me a huge timber thread rack, but then there would be issues of portability (I like to take most of my threads with me when I go Sewjourning), storage space, and dust collection. In last week’s Aldi catalogue I spotted these:

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See the stackable food container in the right? $5.99 for the set of three. So I went out yesterday when they went on sale, and bought quite a few. I also picked up the tea bag storer for the same price while I was there – there are other craft things that will be nicely organised in that. And last night I made a start on sorting my threads into the stackable food containers.

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I can fit 21 spools into each tray. I love that they are flat so that I can see the colours, and I’ll arrange them according to colour. Guess what is going to fill in a couple of hours today? Now I just need a storage solution for my overlocker thread, currently in a cardboard box.

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And if you’ve got any suggestions for good ways to store the myriad of zips that I bought in the same bulk buy as the thread, don’t hesitate to let me know!

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But wouldn’t you know it – even though I’ve had all these colours of threads and all these types and lengths of zips for a couple of months now, I still had to go out and buy a zip and some thread to get an exact match for the jacket that I’m making at the moment!