organizing embroidery floss without bobbins

I love embroidery floss. I love making color palettes, I love taking pictures of it, and I love playing with the pretty skeins. I don't love putting floss on bobbins. Don't get me wrong, I love floss on bobbins and I'm jealous of the folks I know who have all of their threads organized that way. It's just not for me.

Especially because I love having skeins of floss to photograph (these were taken with an iPad, so forgive the quality, please!). In fact, sometimes people ask me how I manage to have such perfect skeins in my pictures. The secret is that I have duplicate skeins that I never use (or at least I try really hard not to).

Having all these skeins of floss everywhere rarely looks organized, but after seeing someone use photo boxes to store their floss, I thought I'd give it a try.



So, this is a complete set of DMC colors, minus their most recent addition of colors, which doesn't have an official location yet. There are 17 boxes in all. And this set is going to remain intact so I always have the colors available for photos and color reference.

The colors in the boxes sort of correspond with the color of the box, but not quite as closely as I would have liked.

Each box contains 20-26 skeins, except for the larger clear box that's labeled 17-19. That one has neutrals, and contains closer to 60 skeins. I might be pushing it on capacity for that, but we'll see.



For the main method of organization, I looked to the DMC color card. See, I like seeing things grouped by color, rather than number. But sometimes that makes it tricky to find things. Since the color card is set up more by color than number, I knew it would help me out big time.

Each box, therefore, represents a column on the card.



If I look at the colors on the card, I can see the column and box where I'll find that skein. If I know the number I'm looking for, I can also use the index, which tells me the column/box.

Within the boxes, the skeins are in loose order (I laid them out in order then carefully scooped them up to place them in the box). But even if they are way out of order, I'm only looking through about 2 dozen skeins to find what I'm looking for.



For now, each box has a numbered sticky note on top. This way, if I want to change my system, it's easy to do that.



16 colorful cases, plus one extra case makes a complete set with easy to find skeins!



And because these are intended for photo storage, they even came with an outer case that holds all of the 16 smaller boxes. I found this at Michaels, by the way. And I already went back to get a second set so that I can now set up another one with all of the floss that I actually use. Hopefully everything fits!

Technically, this isn't a sponsored post, but I want to send mega thanks to DMC for generously sending me embroidery floss from time to time.