Having completed my first cross stitch project, I find myself with a storage problem. What to do with the leftover floss? I have to admit I thought about just throwing it all away and pretending I didn't know anything about it. But then I realized that I would kick myself some day when I just needed one little bit of a particular color that I knew I'd had left over.
I went to the local big box craft store and was exhausted by all the storage possibilities. I settled on one of the cheapest and least involved: a $2 kit of plastic storage bobbins and a metal ring to keep them on. Now it looks like I have a huge janitor's keychain, but instead of keys, it has bobbins of floss with little dangly bits of thread.
Another option is to buy a plastic floss bobbin storage case which is designed to hold the bobbins. The down side to using bobbins is that you have to rewind all of your floss on them in order to store them, and they can be hard to label.
Blogger Ruth Lane at Permutations in Fiber keeps her bobbins tidily stored inside binders, with individual pouches for each bobbin. You can follow her tutorial, or buy baseball card storage pages from a comic book shop.
If you don't want to rewind your floss onto bobbins, a lot of crafters use snack-size ziplock bags to store their embroidery floss. Leah at zombies wearing helmets went one step further and created a storage system out of a Coke bottle box. So cute AND tidy!
And finally, there is the Stitch Bow floss holder. These look like giant floss picks, and apparently you can just slide the floss skein onto them, with no rewinding needed. I haven't tried these but they look intriguing!
Image courtesy Flickr/Follow the White Bunny
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