Are you also obsessed with the ‘Home Edit‘ on Netflix? It seems that organizing is all the rage these days, so I thought it would be fitting to write a blog post about how to organize your embroidery thread. Because the more you do embroidery or cross stitching, the more threads you’ll accumulate. At a certain point, it may become overwhelming to actually organize all of you threads. That’s why we’ll explain what you can do to start to organize your embroidery floss.
What do you need?
As you start gathering more and more embroidery floss, I recommend you to use bobbins to wrap them around in. Not only is this a huge help in organizing your threads, but also makes it a lot easier to actually use them to stitch. I remember the first time I had to use embroidery floss, it got me all confused and literally had me entangled in a pile of thread mess. I have since become a lot more nifty with embroidery floss and have made a video that shows how I go about it.
In addition to using bobbins, I also highly recommend using an embroidery organizing box with multiple compartments. For those of you living in the Netherlands, in addition to Bol.com, you can also find them in most Pipoos stores, which is where I bought mine. I remember it being considerably cheaper than the one at bol.com, however Pipoos does not offer it online. Action has also had embroidery organizing boxes, but as you probably know, there assortment regularly changes. I remember their box having off-brand embroidery floss as well which I have not tried and I am not likely to as I always go for DMC floss (I need their specific colors for patterns as well).
The next step
Once you have that sorted, the next question you have to ask yourself is; do I do cross stitching more or do I do embroidery more? The answer to this will influence the way you can most efficiently organize your threads.
Cross stitch
Do you mainly do cross stitching? If that is the case, I recommend to organize your embroidery floss by number. This is because cross stitch patterns always include specific numbers for the threads you have to use. This is why it would be more logical to also organize them by number.
At first I thought that DMC had assigned numbers to threads in logical color order, but this is not necessarily true. As I mainly do cross stitching myself, I have organized my embroidery box based on number. When I look at my embroidery box, it looks like the colors are all mixed.
Embroidery
If you do embroidery more, then it I would recommend you to organize your embroidery floss by color. Especially if you embroider your own drawings or designs. You would want to pick your own color combination, and having your thread organized by color would be a great visual tool.
A little bit of both
If you find that you don’t lean to either mainly cross stitching or embroidery, I would personally say; organize it by number. The reason why this is my personal preference is because you spot the color more easily than the number. So, when you have tour threads organized by number and you are going to do an embroidery project, you can still spot the colors at a glance by opening your embroidery box. Whereas if you are looking for a number, it would take you a bit longer. I recently did a cross stitch pattern that had assigned colors in the pattern that were a completely different color than the thread (so the pattern showed a blue line for a green backstitch). This made me all the more happy that I had my colors organized by color.
I realize that this is not the Clea and Joanne (from the Home Edit) way, since they love a rainbow 🙂 But it is the way that makes it more easy to maintain for me.
Do you have any tips you would like to share? Let us know in the comments below!
