Tuesday Tips: Curtain Rod Organizer

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  It's been a long time since I've done a tip Tuesday, and not because I haven't had anything to share!  I have lots to share, I've just been super lazy about it.  But I'm feeling really good today, so I'm going to share with you a fun little tip that makes my craft room a little nicer to work with.

If you're an extreme crafter like me, you probably have a ton of tools.  Scissors, rulers, rotary cutters, odds and ends that are useful but hard to store.  You don't want to have them just sitting around because that's a lot of clutter, and I don't know about you but I don't have much room as it is.  You also don't want to put them in a box or a drawer because you'd be pulling them out every day, and that's a pain.  So let me show you a cool trip I saw on the internet that works for me.

Tada!  The curtain rod organizer.  Now I can hang my tools right above my craft table and everything is there right within reach.  What I used was a very cheap curtain rod from Walmart, which was less than $5 and came with all the hardware needed to hang it.  It took less than 10 minutes to hang this up! 

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to use as hooks to hang everything, and what I ended up deciding was 12 gauge craft wire.  It's very soft and easy to work with, but thick enough and strong enough to hold everything.  I just wrap it around the rod a couple of times, and leave a hook at the end to hang things on.

Now I do have one special hook on my curtain rod for a pair of old fashioned all steel scissors.  They're pretty loose scissors, and they fall open if I put then on a normal hook.  So what I did for them is I made a loop with the wire and rest the scissors in the loop.

Cheap, fast, an easy!  That's my favorite kind of organizing tip :)  So how do you guys store your scissors and other crafting tools?  Have any good tips you want to share?  I'd love to hear!

Tuesday Tip: Wrangling Craft Cord

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  I hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was not quite so great; hubs just got over a bad cold and I was going crazy because I hadn't been alone for well over a week.  Eeek!  (Good thing I'm not a parent, right?  Lol)  Thankfully he's fully over his cold now and back to work, and I have the whole house to myself again!

So this week's tip came to me when I was working on the Floss Card Pattern.  While I was wrapping up my embroidery floss, I had to untangle it from a bunch of my craft cord, and I thought that the floss card idea would work great for the cord. 

Of course, the cord is much thicker and comes in pretty long hanks.  It's even more unwieldy than loose embroidery floss, if you can believe that, so there's no way that it would fit on the floss card.  Instead, I decided to just wing it and make something that looked appropriately sized.

Here's a before picture of a hank of cord:

And here's the after:

Much better! 

Since I didn't use a specific pattern, I decided to make this a tip instead.  Basically what I did was I made the floss card pattern only bigger, and finished off with the tape just like I did with the floss card.  I just used scraps of plastic canvas in shapes that looked big enough.  Then when I was done, it all fit nicely into a little shoe box with my collection of embroidery floss.

Tada!  Now instead of a messy ball of knots in a dark and dusty drawer somewhere, they're neatly wound cards filed away on my crafting bookshelf. 

So how do you keep your small bits of cord or string organized?  This is the best idea I've come up with, but to be honest, before I did this all my string really was balled up in a drawer out of sight!  Which worked until I needed something, lol.

Have a great Tuesday, everyone!

Tip Tuesday: Wall Thread Storage

What is it about the new year that makes me (and apparently everyone else) want to start organizing our lives?  Is it the fact that we all decide we want to start the new year with a clean slate (and desk)?  We want to clean out last year's messes and swear this year will be different?  Or maybe the real answer is, that we just want to find room to put all those new things we got for Christmas!  Either way, I think we all have at least a little bit of that urge to start going through drawers and clearing out the old and getting a little more harmony in our lives.

If you follow my blog at all, you know that I've been on an organizing kick lately.  I go through this about once a year.  Last year, I spent an entire week doing nothing but organizing, ironically, my craft room.  Despite how messy and unkept it is now, it was way worse before that.  I figure if I keep doing this once a year, I'll eventually get it the way I want it!

Just a warning, the post ahead is picture heavy!

Free Friday: Floss Card

 This week's Free Friday is part pattern, part tutorial.  In the spirit of getting organized, I decided to tackle my messy embroidery floss collection, and took lots of pictures along the way so that maybe it can help someone else get organized too! 

I have a confession to make.  I'm very messy most of the time.  I have a bad habit of not putting my crafting supplies away, or leaving them in a messy bundle to deal with later.  I'm usually too busy thinking about my next project to finish cleaning up from the last one! 

However, once or twice a year, I'll get motivated and start putting away my junk and trying to organize so that maybe I won't be so tempted to just leave everything laying around.  After all, I figure, if it's neat and well organized, that should make me want to keep it that way, right? 

I'm in the process of getting my craft supplies organized right now, and for some reason, one of the first projects I decided to tackle was my messy collection of embroidery floss.  I don't use embroidery floss very often, but I have intentions to start incorporating it into my plastic canvas designs more in the future, so I figured I'd better get it organized now.  This is how my (admittedly small) collection looked yesterday morning.

Some still tied up hanks, a couple of scary messy loose balls, and a bunch of badly organized floss on one of those store bought rings and the little, nearly useless plastic store bought cards.  The cards at least keep it somewhat organized, but in my opinion, they're too small and they don't hold the whole hank very well.  Plus, the little slots you're supposed to put the ends into to keep them from unraveling don't always hold the floss, and it ends up creating a mess anyway. 

So here is my solution!

A slightly longer, homemade floss card made out of scrap plastic canvas pieces!  So at least for me, it was totally free (if you don't have a large collection of PC pieces, it may cost you a couple of dollars, but that's still not too bad).

A piece of plastic canvas on its own isn't that impressive though.  There's still nowhere to attach the loose ends, and there's nowhere to write what color the floss is.  This is where tape comes in!  I used masking tape, but I'm sure you could use blue painters tape, a solid color of washi tape, or even colorful duct tape if you were so inclined.  I'm not a big tape person though, so all I had available was regular old masking tape.

When you're done, you'll end up with this:

Which I designed to fit perfectly into my Gingham Thread Box.  That way, not only is your floss well organized, but it's stored away neatly as well!

So onto the pattern/tutorial!

Embroidery Floss Card

Skill Level:

Beginner

Materials:

• Scrap pieces of 7-count plastic canvas
• 3/4 inch wide masking tape
• Fine tip permanent marker

Instructions:

Cut plastic canvas according to graph. 

12x21 holes

Cut tape about 1/2 inch longer than the short end of the embroidery card.  Carefully attach the tape, lining up the edge of the tape to the fourth thread in from the short end of the card, as pictured below.  Leave equal amounts of tap overhanging on either side.

Fold in the two side ends, like so:

Then fold the top down.

Next, lay another piece of tape on the opposite side of the card (the side with the folded over tape), using the picture below as a guide.  Cut the tape so that none hangs over the sides, but it still hangs over the top.

Your card should now look like this:

Next, fold the top piece over.

(Sorry for the bad picture).  Turn the card over to the side with no seams and use the marker to write the floss information.  I like to write the number, the company, and I add letters to describe what it is (for instance, EF for embroidery floss, or PC for pearl cotton).

Next, take your scissors and cut a small slit on either side of the taped piece, as shown:

Insert the end of your floss into one of the slits.  Fold the short end down across the center part of the card, and start wrapping the other end around it.  This will keep one end of your floss securely out of the way so it won't unravel from the wrong end.

Continue wrapping until the whole piece of floss is on the card.  Insert the end into the other slit.

Tada!  Now you have less messy embroidery card that's not very likely to unravel on you.  Next, if you haven't already, make yourself a Gingham Thread Box to store your cards in.  They're designed to fit perfectly into this lovely box.

There's a little room left on top, so I stored another dozen or two more cards facing the other way.

Then just close the box and your floss is perfectly organized and neatly contained!

Well, I hope you all enjoyed my tutorial/pattern and I hope it comes in handy for you!  I'll probably end up making several more boxes and lots more cards as I collect more floss, but at least now I know how to keep it well organized so it doesn't become a huge ball of knots!

I hope you all have a great weekend :)