Storing Victoria Clayton Silks

Since I know several of you are ordering or have ordered Victoria Clayton Silks, and since it’s been asked, I thought I’d share how I store mine.

There’s no right or wrong way to store them but I did try several ways and this is what I like, as of now. I did a post back in October about storing floss but this one will have a bit of updated info.

These are my favorites. They are the Everything Mary 5 Compartment Storage Box at JoAnn. I’ve ordered them several times and every time, they’ve been on sale for $1.49. Make sure before hitting the button but right now, they’re showing up as $1.49. Some stores may have them but I’ve always ordered them online. According to the website, this one is 5.75″ x 3.75″ x 1.25″. You can see that they will hold 36 bobbins.

Next, is a larger purple bobbin case.

This is the Artbin Purple Bobbin Box. The dimensions are 3.5″ x 11.29″ x 9.3″. This one is currently $3.29 on the website. I have not used this one but I do have some on order. If the measurements are correct, it’s wider than a sheet of paper and almost as long, but yet it

Finally, there’s this one:

It’s the Artbin Large Bobbin Box. The dimensions on this one are 8.25″ x 4.375″ x 1.25″. I do have these and these measurements make me believe the measurements for the purple bobbin box are way off but I’ll post once it arrives. I’ll also take pictures of all three of them side by side. It is currently on sale for $4.99.

Some of Vikki Clayton’s bobbins are BIG and they will fit in this. I have yet to figure out how I ended up with the big bobbins. I like the big bobbins but if i have 5 projects going that all need white, having one large bobbin isn’t as convenient as having 5 smaller ones but for the redwork projects, a large bobbin would be nice.

A concern that’s larger than storage is what to do with the floss while stitching. I unwind about 18 – 20″ of six stranded floss, pull out one strand . . now what am I going to do with the other five strands?

Here’s what’s working for me. I will wrap the remaining 5 strands (or 4, or 3 – whatever is left), and place it back in the same “row” with the main bobbin. On the project shown above, I only have 11 bobbins. I make sure that I don’t have like colors in the same row. I would not put those two greens in the same row because if I had floss loose, off the bobbin, I could easily get those two mixed up. Yes, I could wind the floss back onto the bobbin but this is much faster, especially if I pull out a strand and only need to make a few stitches, then pull out another and only need to make a few stitches.

I don’t know that for my kind of stitching, I’ll ever end up using more than 6 shades of one color or more than about 30 different colors (because if I’m storing loose floss, I like to have no more than 5 bobbins in each row, though 7 bobbins per row will fit in this case, but if I did, I’d just use two cases to keep everything from getting confused.

I’ve read about people putting the bobbins in individual floss storage bags and putting the loose floss in with the bobbin but, I may be hard on the bags but the few times I’ve used the bags, they rarely make it through a project. It’s $10 for 100 bags and $1.49 for the pink bobbin cases that I know will last through multiple projects so . . for now, this is the storage solution that’s working for me.