DIY Spool Holder
So, as I said in my last post, I have a decent amount of thread. I bought 40 spools of the embroidery thread with my machine and my mother got me 20 big rolls and 20 smaller rolls of thread for Christmas. I also had various threads from when I did more hand sewing, so there was a lot of thread being tossed around. I was swimming in threads, which was cool cause that means I almost always have a color to match whatever I am making. But, to keep with my new years resolutions, I needed to get more organized. I organized all my fabrics (kind of) last weekend...
...and now it is time for everything else. In the process of organizing my fabrics into more manageable rolls, I had made room in one of my big drawers for all my patterns, of which I have many. That made more room in my smaller drawers and so on and so forth. I still had the issue of my threads sitting in boxes on the floor. The only bad part about the weather warming up is that it brings the spiders back out. Recluses tend to hide in the winter, which is great for me because I spent all winter cutting fabric on my floor in Spider Town aka the sewing room. The Singer Sew Essentials that mom got me was ok sitting on the floor, as no spiders can get into it. However, the embroidery thread was in the cardboard they came in, and we all know recluses love cardboard, so that had to go.
I got to looking, and I noticed that all the spool holders I saw for sale were boring and expensive, so I started to look for home made ones and I came across this one...
Wowza! Yes! This is what I wanted to make! I read the post on how the lady and her husband made it. I already had the frame... funny story. I was helping my brother move (I drive a truck) and he had a couple of bags of crap to be thrown away along with an old tv box. Inside this tv box was a perfectly good picture frame (why was he tossing it?!?!) with a generic picture inside it. It looks like something that hangs at an office. Well, not my office... I have a very nice asian goose thingy hanging on the wall that I got at Goodwill. Anywho, the frame was big enough for all my thread, so I removed the backing which was held on by a ton of staples that I had to carefully pry out. Then I removed the cardboard that the picture was glued to and I also removed the thin piece of glass. I was left with just the frame.
The inside of the frame was 16 X 20, so I gathered mom and we headed to Lowes for some wood! We got there and I found a very solid piece for $7.44 that they cut down to size for me, which left me with 2 smaller scrap pieces. The inside of the frame had a little lip on it, so the board fit snugly into place. Well, he cut it slightly off, so it did fit, but there was a small gap. Anywho, I also bought 2 packs of 'moulding and trim nails' for $1.30 a pack. There are 40 nails in each pack so I needed 2 packs for my current thread collection.
This is where math comes into play. I took the piece of wood and decided that I would only put my embroidery thread on this piece and my other threads on one of the board scraps. I measured out the bottom of one of the embroidery spools and it measured 1.5" across, so if I did the math, each spool would have about 3.5" total space. That worked out well, since I really wanted to keep the stickers labeling the colors. They tend to get lost, but with this measurement awesomeness I did, I had room to stick the stickers underneath each spool. My yard stick was about perfectly 1.5" wide, so I just made 8 rows down by 10 rows across by laying down my yard stick and tracing it with a pencil. Then, to make sure I nailed them to the centers of each square, I had to make more lines diagonally so there would be an X in the center of each square. It was a lot of penciling.
Next was power tool time! I took my husband's drill and made a small pilot hole for each nail with a drill bit that was a tad smaller than my nails. I actually drilled until I hit the carpet on the other side (its shag carpet). But since my nails were a bit bigger than the pilot hole, they didn't go all the way through when I nailed them in. It took about 2 or 3 good whacks to get them in there nice and snugly. Then came the wood glue! My husband didn't think it needed glue, but maybe that was just to avoid the mess. I had a couple of brackets that came in a picture frame hanging kit that we were going to use to secure the board to the frame, but I wanted to be doubly sure it would stay, so we glued. It was a mess since the board was cut slightly off, but after a lot of drying and clamping, she looked pretty good!
I am making another one or two soon for my other threads. And there is still room on this frame for the embroidery colors I am missing. My machine came with a list of all the colors, and I am missing 22 off of the master list. So when all is said and done, all the embroidery spools will be in one frame. Boom! :)
...and now it is time for everything else. In the process of organizing my fabrics into more manageable rolls, I had made room in one of my big drawers for all my patterns, of which I have many. That made more room in my smaller drawers and so on and so forth. I still had the issue of my threads sitting in boxes on the floor. The only bad part about the weather warming up is that it brings the spiders back out. Recluses tend to hide in the winter, which is great for me because I spent all winter cutting fabric on my floor in Spider Town aka the sewing room. The Singer Sew Essentials that mom got me was ok sitting on the floor, as no spiders can get into it. However, the embroidery thread was in the cardboard they came in, and we all know recluses love cardboard, so that had to go.
I got to looking, and I noticed that all the spool holders I saw for sale were boring and expensive, so I started to look for home made ones and I came across this one...
Wowza! Yes! This is what I wanted to make! I read the post on how the lady and her husband made it. I already had the frame... funny story. I was helping my brother move (I drive a truck) and he had a couple of bags of crap to be thrown away along with an old tv box. Inside this tv box was a perfectly good picture frame (why was he tossing it?!?!) with a generic picture inside it. It looks like something that hangs at an office. Well, not my office... I have a very nice asian goose thingy hanging on the wall that I got at Goodwill. Anywho, the frame was big enough for all my thread, so I removed the backing which was held on by a ton of staples that I had to carefully pry out. Then I removed the cardboard that the picture was glued to and I also removed the thin piece of glass. I was left with just the frame.
The inside of the frame was 16 X 20, so I gathered mom and we headed to Lowes for some wood! We got there and I found a very solid piece for $7.44 that they cut down to size for me, which left me with 2 smaller scrap pieces. The inside of the frame had a little lip on it, so the board fit snugly into place. Well, he cut it slightly off, so it did fit, but there was a small gap. Anywho, I also bought 2 packs of 'moulding and trim nails' for $1.30 a pack. There are 40 nails in each pack so I needed 2 packs for my current thread collection.
This is where math comes into play. I took the piece of wood and decided that I would only put my embroidery thread on this piece and my other threads on one of the board scraps. I measured out the bottom of one of the embroidery spools and it measured 1.5" across, so if I did the math, each spool would have about 3.5" total space. That worked out well, since I really wanted to keep the stickers labeling the colors. They tend to get lost, but with this measurement awesomeness I did, I had room to stick the stickers underneath each spool. My yard stick was about perfectly 1.5" wide, so I just made 8 rows down by 10 rows across by laying down my yard stick and tracing it with a pencil. Then, to make sure I nailed them to the centers of each square, I had to make more lines diagonally so there would be an X in the center of each square. It was a lot of penciling.
Next was power tool time! I took my husband's drill and made a small pilot hole for each nail with a drill bit that was a tad smaller than my nails. I actually drilled until I hit the carpet on the other side (its shag carpet). But since my nails were a bit bigger than the pilot hole, they didn't go all the way through when I nailed them in. It took about 2 or 3 good whacks to get them in there nice and snugly. Then came the wood glue! My husband didn't think it needed glue, but maybe that was just to avoid the mess. I had a couple of brackets that came in a picture frame hanging kit that we were going to use to secure the board to the frame, but I wanted to be doubly sure it would stay, so we glued. It was a mess since the board was cut slightly off, but after a lot of drying and clamping, she looked pretty good!
I am making another one or two soon for my other threads. And there is still room on this frame for the embroidery colors I am missing. My machine came with a list of all the colors, and I am missing 22 off of the master list. So when all is said and done, all the embroidery spools will be in one frame. Boom! :)
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