Tip of the week.. or so I hope!

One of my goals of the new year is to try to post up a tip of the week... of course this means at some point I might run out of tips since my little pea-brain can only hold so much tippy-goodness but I am going to give it a try!

This week's tip has to do with storing embroidery thread on basic thread racks.  Like many I have a ton of the typical June Tailor thread racks that are ment to hold regular spools of thread. These racks are great space savers when hung on a wall and not too expensive, especially if you can catch them on sale. What they are not, is made for the taller spools of embroidery thread. So while on the rack the spools are prone to tipping off and taking 20 other spools with them, causing me to saying unprintable things  sigh deeply and pick them up once again. 

This was a pretty constant source of frustration to me and I was close to drilling out all the little dowels and replacing them with longer ones when it occured to me that I could work a little smarter  and just add an extension to each  peg for some more stability. I will spare you all the items I tried that ended up either falling off, being hard to deal with or were hard to find and cut to the chase and tell you that run of the mill drinking straws were the perfect answer.  Some straws are a bit bigger and you can pu them all the way down the shaft and then trim to the length you need. Some are smaller ( usually the cheaper brands) and they fit on quite well but are tight and you can't really work them down the whole way. Both choices are great and hold the embroidery thread on the racks like a dream.   If you would like to store color specific bobbins with your thread, cut your straws even longer so you can place the bobbin on top of the thread!