make: an extra floss holder

When I work on an embroidery project, I don't always use all six strands of floss. Or sometimes I use all six, but misjudged how much I needed, and have a length leftover. Have you experienced this? Of course you have.

Now, embroidery floss isn't very expensive, and if you or I ever really saw how much floss I have here right now, we'd both agree that this post is completely ridiculous, because saving strands and scraps isn't really necessary. But I still think it's prudent, and I can't bear to throw those pieces out. So I end up with this:



If you notice, there are parts of this that are fairly organized...and parts that are a complete mess. What to do with it from here? I came up with an idea that transformed my snarled strands into this:



Much tidier!



Here's what you need:
Small plastic bags (these are found near the jewelry section at craft stores)
Canvas or other sturdy fabric (just a bit)
Binder rings
Double-stick tape

Helpful tools:
Crop-a-Dile (I'll share an alternate method if you don't have one of these)
Binder clips



1. Stack up the plastic bags. (You can use as many as you want...I used 15.) Cut a piece of fabric that will wrap around the closed end as a binding.



2. Add some stitching to the fabric if you like, then wrap it around the bags. Holding everything with binder clips makes things a lot easier.



3. Punch two holes in the binding. (I used the 3/16" setting.) Make sure that you are punching the holes far enough in from the edge.

Before I decided to use my Crop-a-Dile, my plan was to hand sew the binding. With the bags and binding clipped, stitch a few rows of running stitch to hold everything together. This would take a bit of effort to go through all of the bags, so use fewer bags for this method.



4. Insert the binder rings, then remove the clips. Use double-stick tape to hold the fabric to the front and back bags.



5. Coil up the floss scraps. (Mine are grouped by similar colors/styles, like metallic, color variations, etc.)



6. Slide the coils of floss into the bags, and be happy that you're organized AND thrifty!



The nice part about this is that you can pop open the binder rings and add more bags if you need to! Because, we all know that we're going to have more extra strands that we'll go through right?

Although, I will say that I expect to have fewer get left unused now that I'm keeping to a limited palette for my work. (I say that, but we'll see what my scraps look like!)