Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Organized, me?

I needed a better way to organize all my sewing thread. All my many spools were neatly packed in a box but it was impossible to see what colours I had. I had to root around to find anything, and removing one spool from the box threw the rest of them into disarray. I was thinking of threading the spools onto wooden doweling and hanging them across a frame, when I opened an old Burda pattern magazine and saw this great idea:

The perfect solution! Of course I had to make one, and it was really easy. I found a piece of cedar in our basement and measured the placement of the holes, then drilled them.  My drilling arm got a bit tired after a while so my dad helped me out.


I used my carpenter's ruler (a very handy tool, by the way, it folds up to just 15 cm in length so you can carry it in your purse, for all your emergency measuring needs) to mark 7mm dowels into 2 1/2 inch lengths (I think the mix and match approach to measurement units must be a canadian thing)...


...and sawed them off using a regular square saw and a mitre box. 

After sanding down the dowel edges and the surface of the plank, it's just a matter of inserting the pegs into the holes in the board. I had planned to use glue, but if you have a good match between drill bit and dowel size, it's not necessary.


I made the mistake of buying the doweling before I knew the dimensions of the board I was going to get, so I ran out of pegs, but as luck would have it I had exactly enough space for all my thread spools, so I suppose I don't have to hurry to finish it.

I have a mild obsession with organizing everything by colour (case in point:I recently bought a red eraser to match the box of läkerol, the tiny notebooks and the box of pens on the red shelf above my desk...) and especially with arranging groups of colours by tone, so I love being able to arrange all these colours and have them hanging on my wall for all to see!

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