Warning! Long post. Floss storage

Good Morning!

I want to start this post with a big thank you for all the wonderful comments on the craft room. I am overwhelmed by the response and touched that some want more pictures. A special thanks has to go out to Daffycat as she posted about it on her blog which led people to mine. Thank you so much!

I had a lot of requests for more pictures and a lot of the requests I had were regarding my floss storage. I have kept my DMC in those nuts and bolt containers that most people use in their garage for 13 years or so. The reason I went to this method is because I have a ton of floss. At one time Hy-Vee food stores carried DMC. One day, Hy-Vee decided they weren't going to carry it anymore. They dumped it all in a big old box and slapped a 5 cents/skein price tag on it and put it in their dollar sale. Right about then I happened by and asked how much for the entire box. I think I paid $10.00 for the whole kit and kaboodle! Then I didn't know what to do with my find so I separated out all the different colors and put them in a ziploc baggie and then into grocery bags. But that made it hard to find a color when I was looking for it. I was complaining telling Dan about my problem one day and he suggested using the nut and bolt containers. So off we went to the store where we bought 7 of them for around $10.00/piece. Later when DMC added more colors we bought a smaller version as we couldn't find the size we had used before. I kept all of these containers in a closet and was quite happy with my system except for the fact that it took up a lot of valuable closet storage space. When we started planning the re-do of the basement room my plan was to still keep it in the closet. But when I started putting everything away....I found I didn't have as much room as what I needed for storage if I did that. I had also added the DMC varigated threads to my stash by this time and needed another storage container. I searched high and low for one the same size as my other ones. I even asked for your help in locating one the same size. Apparently, when I bought the original 7, I must have bought every one they produced because NO ONE had a container with the same dimensions as what I needed. I could find taller ones, shorter ones, and ones with fewer drawers but not 14.5w x 14h x 6.5d. That beast doesn't exist in my world anymore. What you will find is this . It's 18 inches tall and the drawers when you pull them out are slightly shorter than my original ones but they still work. They are also more expensive than they used to be. I thought about buying all new cabinets but decided I didn't want to spend the money when I had 7 perfectly good cabinets already. So I bought one of the 18 inch tall cabinets and decided to make it work. And if I had kept it all in the closet it would have been fine but I wanted that storage space freed up so I decided to just stack them on the floor of the craft room. First I tried them vertically, that was a bad idea. It was very wobbly, you had to lay on your stomach on the floor to see what was in the bottom drawers and when you place them on something to raise them up, being the vertically challenged person that I am, I couldn't see the top drawers. So I stacked them on the floor horizontally. Better, more stable but still laying on the floor to get to them. Dan suggested putting boxes underneath them and that would have worked but they were still too low for my liking. Then I thought, well, they are made for hanging so I'll just hang them. There are 2 problems with that idea. One being the number of holes you would put in your wall and the other, I am a balanced kinda person and with that one 18" cabinet it wasn't going to be a nice rectangular shape on the wall. After much discussion, Dan and I decided building a box that would hang on the wall allowing the cabinets to just slide into the box made the most sense. Fewer holes in the wall, stable, easy to see and it would pretty it up too! BUT, we still have that dumb 18" cabinet throwing a wrench in the works. After much thought we came up with the idea of putting a box inside the box to raise up some of the drawers and make everything all nice and even. And this is the result.


Some of you might have died from boredom right now and I apologize for the lengthy writing but I wanted to go over the process we went through to arrive at our final design to save you from having to think it all through yourselves should you decide to try something like this.

Here is a closeup version of the drawers.

As you can see, I have labeled each drawer with it's number and each drawer holds 5-6 skeins comfortably. Here is a picture of how the floss fits in the drawer.


In the nook we built I keep my containers for Kreinik threads. They fit perfectly in the little plastic organizers which fit perfectly in the nook.



Remember earlier when I said I had a lot of floss? I only keep 5-6 skeins in the cabinets. That still left me with a ton of floss still in those baggies. I decided that I needed a better way to store the overflow that made it easy to see what I had and what I didn't should I ever use all the skeins of a particular color in the drawers. This is what I came up with. Still in baggies, but with acid free mat board added to make them stand up and now they are in numerical order also. I keep up to 10 skeins of each color in the baggies. I have 2 of these bins in the closet.




The overflow of the overflow, in other words, those colors that I just have a crap load of... is still in baggies in a grocery sack and I use it to give away to people. I'm never going to use it so I might as well help other stitcher's when they need it. I'm never sure though if they want it or not as it is older floss. Nothing wrong with it but I worry people won't want it and use it. What do you think?


Are you still with me?? I hope so! Hang in there, I'm almost done.

Now I have to confess that when it comes to my overdyed floss storage, I haven't come up with a great solution. In fact haven't come up with any solution. Yet. A couple of friends of mine have suggested a system that they use and I think I will try to find it. My only problem is it seems to be getting harder and harder to find and I don't want to spend tons right now to make sure I have plenty for the future when I don't need a lot of it at the moment. I've considered doing something similar to what I've done with my overflow DMC and I've thought about having Dan build me a spinner. Still mulling it all over. If you have any brilliant ideas for storing overdyeds please let me know. For now, this is my method.


Not a great solution as you can see. Are you horrified?? I am! I'm open to suggestions on this one folks!

That pretty much covers my floss storage and since this is so long I will leave it with just the floss storage and post more on the craft room in a day or two. If you have any further questions, please feel free to email me and I'll do my best to answer them.

I'm off to help a mother this morning whose son has just been diagnosed with Celiac disease. My daughter was diagnosed a little over a year ago and I wish I had had someone to walk me through the grocery store and point out what she could and couldn't eat, so when my sister asked me if I would mind I said I'd be happy to help. I'm not an expert but I'm better than nothing!

Thanks again everyone for all the lovely comments and stay tuned if you are interested for more of the craft room.

Have a great day!