Dollieh Sanctuary

I store my thread in the little boxes are often found at office supplies stores, along with other items like dolls clothes, and wooden food. And I store my needles by sticking them into a piece of felt. The other rest of my sewing supplies is in a plastic sandwich bag.

My sewing stuff is hopelessly disorganized at the moment. I have a small chest/jewelery box a relative got me for Christmas one year that I used to keep all my thread in. I usually shove whatever I'm working on at the moment in a plastic bag. It's big enough to hold all the material, spare bodies, threads, notions, etc. plus a small sewing bag that keeps my scissors, pins, needles, and measuring tape all together. Keeps it all neat and tidy. The only problem is I like to jump between several different projects so 3 or 4 different things I'm working on end up in a bag together. I really need to find the time to get organized.

I almost exclusively buy gutterman thread since I hand sew and I like the narrow spools. I picked up a special storage box at Joann's that is designed to hold this type of spool and I basically store them in number order which keeps them color coordinated. Any other threads I may have on larger spools are basically in a box somewhere near my rarely used sewing machine LOL.

I put my spools of thread in drawers, organised by colors, nothing too fancy. Most of the spools I own are the large ones, since I do machine sewing for most of the time.

How large is 'the large' spools? I tend to think of the 1" diameter spools with ~200 yards of thread as the 'standard', the 100 meter gutermann as the narrow spool (which are very nice thread), but I also have 1000 yard spools by Coats and Clark and 2500 meter spools by Madeira. The 2500 meter spools are officially for my mother's embroidery machine, but I do use then with my little sewing machine surprisingly regularly, as I needed them for some embroidery project and there was plenty left over as 2500 meters is a LOT of thread.

I keep my crochet thread in sew through drawers. I used to keep my sewing thread on one of those racks, until my husband's cat was able to trail thread from my workroom to the entry hall from one of my bigg spools-without the spool leaving the rack. My husband said it was a giant "cat's cradle" that spanned the house. Now, all my thread is in containers with lids, but it is sorted by use, hand sewing or machine.