The Mill on the Floss - a Wednesday WOW Story

OK.  No, this has nothing to do with George Eliot's novel or misguided love or floods or anything like that.  It just sounded catchy!  Because this post is about - er - floss.  The stitching kind.

I have a major collection of DMC cotton floss.  For many years my  free time was spent doing cross-stitch.  I was working and raising a family, and there was little time for hand work.  Cross stitch is something I can do in small blocks of time and I love the way the colors build up a picture.

Up until recently, I stored my floss in two small parts cabinets, sorted by DMC number.  Finding colors specified in a pattern is really easy with this kind of system.  Although it gets a little messy, it has worked so far.

More recently, however, my embroidery work has been in the form of embellishments.  In some cases I have designed my own pattern and I hope to do more of that.  Which means I am choosing my threads by color.  Which is downright impossible to do in the current system!

So, I've been winding skeins of floss onto thread cards.  And storing them in this:

They are still sorted by DMC number at this point.  I still have some patterns I want to stitch.  But I can also see the colors easily and choose just what I need.

Now, winding threads is kind of mindless work.  Great for sitting in front of a TV show or video.  Or, even thinking!  Except for the tangling part, that is.  So I came up with a system using these two jam jars.  They are just the right size for a skein and the tangling is reduced by quite a bit.

Now, if I could just figure out what to do with all those little snaps!