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Easy Ways to Store Embroidery Floss

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floss storage ideas

I feel like this is something we have talked about before, but since I just bought my daughter a bunch of embroidery floss to go in her new sewing kit of Christmas, I need all the help I can get in keeping it (and mine, for that matter) well-organized.

30 Handmade Days uses one of those plastic organizer boxes with the little bobbins for thread, but she has a great hack for winding them all, using a power drill. So cool.

Wild Olive’s Alison slips her skeins onto craft sticks with holes punched in the end so they can be stored on binder rings. Easy, inexpensive and you can take the colors you need for a project while traveling with ease.

Make your own bobbins out of paper – and add some cat lady flair – with this tutorial from Little White Whale. My kitty-loving daughter would certainly appreciate those.

If you like your floss visible, use clothespins, nails and a frame for a stylish solution via Ameroonie Designs.

I’ve also seen the clothespins on a pegboard, or stored in Mason jars, which would be cute if you have surface space to store them in.

How do you store your embroidery floss? I’d love to hear your ideas.

[Photo: Wild Olive.]

Looking for more Christmas Cross Stitch patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

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Comments

  1. Lucky for me, my son loves pickles, so I get the ginormous pickle jars from the grocery store. I have an old antique weaving loom, and my embroidery floss & ribbon are wrapped on dollar store clothespins and stored in the big pickle jars, sorted by colors. It’s now art and storage. Storing by color for me stops me from buying more because I don’t want to dig through the jars for the color I want. Ribbons and trims are wrapped around old peg clothespins, secured with tiny hairbands and in big cheeseball snack containers. With this system, I can see what I have.

Have you read?

Cross Stitch the National Parks in Tiny Form

I love little cross stitch patterns, but it’s especially fun when a small cross stitch design has a lot of detail going on. That’s the case with this collection of national parks cross stitch patterns from Stitchin Madness. 

This isn’t really a pattern, it’s a full-on book with designs for all 63 of the national parks in the United States (which includes the Virgin Islands). Each design is unique and shows a distinctive feature or the park or what the landscape there looks like. 

The book includes a full table of contents and numbered pages to make it easy to find the design you want to make. 

Each design is 40 by 40 stitches without the park name included, and 40 by 50 stitches if you add the name. They’re designed for 14 count fabric and if you make all of them you’ll use 72 colors, though each individual pattern uses a lot fewer colors than that. 

These would be so fun to make as you visit different parks, or make the whole set to frame together if you’re a big travel person who loves the national parks. They’d also be fun as greeting cards or even ornaments for your tree with the year you visited added to it somewhere. 

The photo above shows a nice collection of some of the patterns in hoops, but I could see them done in little frames as well. This should give you a taste for what the designs look like and might even include your favorite park (mine is Acadia because I went there on my honeymoon; it isn’t on here but you can see it on the product page. 

If you’re ready to stitch the national parks, or even just a handful of them, check out this pattern book from Stitchin Madness on Etsy. I’d love to know which national park is your favorite or what you would stitch up first!

[Photo: Stitchin Madness]