Organize This: Thread

Before I dive into today’s Organize This post, I first have to thank you guys for all the wonderful love lately! Between my three-months-in home tour, the laundry room reveal, and my soul-bearing post earlier this week, you guys have been so kind, gracious, and supportive. I love that so many of you are feeling connected to me and inspired by the things I’m posting here each week, and I thank you for spending some of your precious time here. Hugs all around!

Okay – let’s get into this week’s quick Organize This project! Just a reminder to anyone who might be new to this series…every other week I post a quick, simple, and inexpensive organizing solution for some common problem areas around the home. These projects aren’t intended to be big, grand, organizational undertakings, but rather simple fixes that can be done in well under an hour. With the weekend right around the corner, it’s the perfect time to tackle one of the problem areas in your house! This week, I’m sharing my solution for my thread problem:

I LOVED staging and sharing my office progress with you guys a few weeks back, but how many of you saw my big ol’ jar of thread and thought to yourself, “Well, that is about the most impractical way to store thread that I’ve ever seen!” Yep, I’m raising my hand right now too! The big vase of thread sure looked great, and I knew it wasn’t a forever solution…still I left it as is because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do insetad. Since I have been spending more time at my sewing machine lately, I quickly became exasperated digging for the right color thread…and so organizing my thread moved to the top of my To Do List!

In our last home, I had bought two of these thread organizers from the fabric store and mounted them on the wall. While they functioned, as designed, quite perfectly to sort, organize and keep my thread handy, I found I wasn’t sewing much, so having them on constant display felt a bit silly. Then in this house, I made the decision to conceal ALL of my craft supplies behind closed doors to keep the visual clutter and busyness to a minimum, and I was left without a space to mount my organizers…or so I thought!

I really didn’t want to keep the thread out in the open all the time, but I still wanted it handy enough to access when the mood for sewing struck. While the cabinets under my craft counter are full, there was one spot that hand’t yet been put to use…

The insides of the doors! After some quick measurements, I quickly determined that the end doors, which are a bit larger than the middle doors, could comfortable hold a single thread organizer!

We own these cabinets and they move with us, so originally I was just going to screw right into the cabinet doors. But with each move and (seemingly with my every whim), I re-arrange and re-organize things a lot, so I didn’t want permanent screw holes in the doors. A while back I had picked up some Command hanging strips and figured I’d give them a go. I followed the instructions, and within minutes, my organizer was mounted to the inside of my right cabinet door!

Originally, I planned to mount the second organizer to the other larger door on the other end of the counter. However, as I sorted and really looked through all my threads, I realized that I had VERY similar shades of many colors…certainly they ALL didn’t need to be accessible. So I sorted and prioritized some more to come up with a collection of threads that would fit onto a single organizer.

For the type and amount of sewing I do, I really don’t need quick access to every shade along the color gradient, but I now have enough color options sorted and ready when the next sewing project comes up!

The remaining thread got loaded back into the big vase and sits close by. If I really don’t have a color I need OR I want/need to replace thread on the rack as I use it up, I can quickly and easily sort through the remaining spools in the vase.

What I really love about this solution for my thread is not only do I have it out of the jar and easier to access, but the organizer is mounted to the door JUST below the drawer that holds all my sewing tools. When it’s sewing time, everything is now in one centralized location!

Organize This

My Organize This series is all about (relatively) simple and quick organizing projects that make a big difference in your day-to-day life. These aren’t intended to be large organizational overhauls, but rather quick sessions you can accomplish in an afternoon or weekend! This thread organization project is exactly that: quick and easy enough to do today or this coming weekend! Catch up on other projects in this series by clicking on the pictures below:

Tomorrow is garage sale day for us (yay!), so I’m busily printing out a bunch of these labels and going through our things to see what else I can part with. I genuinely have learned to LOVE garage sale days, so I’m looking forawrd to the weekend ahead! Next week, I’m planning on showing you around our “new” deck setup and finally reveal how I hung the flamingo “wallpaper” in the laundry room. See you back here then!