Storage Solution Sunday - a day late...

Sorry I'm a day late with this! What can I say, it's the holiday weekend - we made a spontaneous decision yesterday morning to pack up the car and head to San Antonio to visit the zoo. Carter had so much fun (for a little while, anyway) - got to see all of his favorite animals - lions, tigers, bears - OH MY! :-)

So today I'm going to talk about ribbon storage! *Some* cardmakers and scrapbookers out there have been known to have a bit of a ribbon fetish... you know who you are! *wink* Ok, I'm talking about MYSELF! But I'm sure I'm not alone in this! So what to do with all that ribbon!?!?!

The solution pictured to the left I found at Home Depot, but you could find any number of places - paper towel racks! But I pretty much have a love/hate relationship with this solution! I sort of love it - because I love this easy access to my ribbon, it hangs just to the right of my desk. Plus I love to just look at my ribbon and say "aaaahhh, ribbon is so pretty!". But I don't love it for a few reasons: the spools have been known to spontaneously unwind since they can roll on the rods! I typically put a little piece of tape on the ends to hold them in place (which you can see I'm lazy about replacing at times!). And the other issue is that if I want to take a spool off a rod, to take to a crop or a workshop, I have to unscrew the ends and remove the other spools to get to the one I want - somewhat of a pain! So, I can't say I'm highly recommending this solution - it has it's pros & cons. :-) And this is not all of my ribbon either - you may remember I posted this box a while back, I keep some of my Michael's cheap ribbon in there. The photo to the right is another solution I use, that I rather like. This is a box I picked up at Joann's for storing embroidery floss, it comes with little pieces of cardboard to wind the floss (or ribbon!) on, and I used it to tidy up my various bits of ribbon I've collected from ribbon shares, etc. It took a bit of time to get them all wound on the cards and into the box, but now that they are there, they make me very happy (and more likely to actually use them!). I bought a second box recently, I plan to tidy up my various scrap ribbons into that box. This box also fits the mini-spools quite well (I have some along the left side of this one) - I may get a third box because I have a bunch more of those floating around a pencil box at the moment. :-)

I had already planned to post about ribbon this weekend, and as luck would have it, there's been talk of ribbon storage on a few other blogs this week as well:

Sharon published an article on Craft Critique about the SU ribbon holders
Julia posted about the Cropper Hopper Ribbon Storage (C'est bon - according to Julia!) :-)

But what I think I'll do, someday when I put together my dream studio, is what I saw on Amy's blog. This looks like ribbon heaven to me!!! I love that it's all sorted out by color, and those racks would solve my spontaneous-unwinding problem. Ahhh, someday...! :-)

If you've posted about your ribbon storage solution that you love, or have seen other great ideas on various blogs, please link 'em up in the comments - since I'm not completely in love with what I have, I'm always on the lookout for better ideas!!