Ready Thread Go

When I first moved into this house (almost 2 years ago now!), I unpacked my sewing supplies and called it done. But I really didn't organize a lot of it to my liking. Since I haven't been sewing regularly for a while, I just grimace through it when I do dust off the machines. But my thread was irritating me just a bit too much and I realized it's been a mental roadblock keeping me from sewing more. So I decided that today was the day I would finally tackle it instead of forever searching the rows for the right color, or more likely, just ignoring sewing altogether. 

It only took a couple of hours and it's not like I haven't been inside this house most of the last year with time on my hands, so I don't know why the procrastination, but I'm guessing we've all accumulated a lot of those feelings lately so I'm not going to offer any specific excuse except to say, oh well. 

I meant to take a pic before I started pulling spools off, but whoops. I did remember after pulling off the whites and browns. 

And here are the racks completely empty. Same as when I was in my rental house, I hung the racks using Command Velcro strips. I love those for this. First, no doors are harmed, and second (and almost as important), no measuring is needed to get everything lined up. I've found that using the Command strips on some painted walls hasn't turned out as well, but a wall is a lot easier to fix than a hole in a door.  

I pulled off all the spools and arranged them in groups of colors on a blanket pulled across my bed (which is about 5 steps from the door). Also, see my treadle makeup table? I really don't have room for it anywhere else but I also don't want to get rid of it. Makeup table it is. Although what IS makeup anymore?

And then I stared at the piles for a while, trying to decide how I wanted them to run into each other. 

In the end, I went with whites/beiges at the top, going into grays and then blues, greens, black, yellows, pinks, reds, oranges. I ended up with empty rows for expansion and weird stuff on the bottom row like nylon thread, fusible thread, etc. Because of my coverstitch machine, I tend to buy multiples of the same colors. For many of those, I use straws over the pegs so I can stack spools. For basics, like blacks, whites, grays, and browns, I keep them single so I have room to expand within a color range using the straws if needed but without having to move the entire collection of spools up or down. 

And since we're on thread, serger cones are kept in 2 drawers of an IKEA unit under my machine table. 

And bobbins in Bobbin Savers behind my sewing machine. 

 

And that's probably more than you wanted to know about my thread.

I have a pattern printed and taped together, but I don't think I have fabric in the house that is suitable. So, another small project today will be getting into some fabric bins in the garage. I actually got rid of a lot of fabric when I moved so I'm not even sure what's out there, but I really, really do NOT want to turn looking in those bins into another organization project. I think I'll take my phone out there and just take some general pics so I have some record of what's there and call it done.