When I think back to the days when I first started stitching, in my childhood, I don’t remember my threads tangling up the way they do now. A visit to the haberdashery shop with mum was such a treat. We would each come home with little white paper bags filled with beautifully coloured silky skeins of thread that I would lay carefully in my sewing box. I remember my padded floral sewing box brimming with threads, lots of pinks of course, and not a single bird’s nest tangle in sight.
Now I just need to look at a skein of thread and it practically snarls up on the spot. I love a fresh new skein but once I start using them - yuck.
We’ve been busy putting together our Alphabet Sampler kits lately with 29 skeins of thread, all of them beautiful colours, and they look so lovely laid out nicely next to each other. It made me wonder how they would be stored when they reach their destination.
The Stitchery Alphabet Sampler kit with 29 skeins of thread
When I resumed stitching, about ten years ago now, I became obsessed with finding a way to store threads. I began with the special plastic boxes filled with plastic bobbins. I bought the DMC number stickers and kept a list in the back of my notebook to tick off the ones I’d got, so that I could avoid duplicates when shopping. The sight of those bobbins all neatly stacked and labelled, in colour order was so inspiring to me. (I have dug out a couple of photos from my old blog - Homebird - to show you.)
I spent the summer of 2012 working on this pretty cross stitch kit from a lovely book. I still love to see a nice tidy box of colours like this but I don’t like how the thread gets such tight kinks in it and now I stitch so much more often and keep SO many more colours in my stash, this doesn’t work for me any more.
I use DMC for all of my kits because they come in the widest variety of colours and they are easy for people to get hold of replacement colours all over the world. I buy them in large cones and keep them in (sort of) colour order in the studio.
For my personal stitching and in my stash I have not only DMC and Anchor but also Au ver a Soie, Temaricious, Sajou, The Gentle Art, Weeks Dye Works, Cottage Garden Threads, Mulberry Silks, Aurifil and Valdani, to mention just a few. They all come packaged differently and so I like to keep them on wooden spools and I have just found a sweet rack on Amazon to display them all. (Winding them all onto spools is a work in progress and something I have my niece do for me on the weekends to earn a bit of pocket money!)
This is my current favourite storage method for large quantities of thread - I keep a sample of every colour from the cones so that I can easily transport them for kit designs. They look pretty too!
Finally, for my other threads I like to wind them onto my spare collection cards. You can buy them pre-wound here with my ‘favourites’ collections on. I’ll also be selling them in packs soon so that you can use them for your own thread storage. I use tiny white stickers to hold them in place on the back and they keep really neatly hung on a hinged metal thread.
Our lush Studio Assistant, Clairey, is making up the thread collections like a trooper and I have just updated stock amounts in the shop HERE for the Rosy Pinks, Spring Pastels and Bluebell Woods collections. We have also created a Forget-me-nots collection, as requested by the group at my Zoom class last month. If you fancy stitching a few forget-me-nots I have a free pdf pattern over in my online studio HERE along with a recording of the online class I held too.
Thanks for reading! Hope you and your families are staying well and safe.
Love
Nicki xx