Re-Organizing Linen

Yesterday was my stitching day with Debbie. I love our days together! We have so much fun . . I do anyway. I hope she has fun too. We stitch. We talk. We laugh. Debbie always has new things to show me – something she has seen on Instagram or flosstube that she shares with me. Yesterday she was showing me an Instagram post (is that what you call them?) or a floss tube where someone had re-organized all her linen. She placed it on comic book boards. That’s an affiliate link and those are the ones I ordered. There are so many to choose from but they’re mostly the same size and acid free so I can’t say one is better than the other. I had a few of them here already so I was able to get started re-organizing my linen.

I store mine in 27 quart Sterilite containers. The linen is folded and stacked in the tubs. It can be hard to find the right piece! I have it divided according to count but there are quite a few tubs of the 40 count, which I use the most. I’m not terribly picking about which linen I choose. If some of the floss doesn’t show up on whatever linen I choose, it’s easy to change the floss color. But, I make a huge mess (with everything I do) digging through the linen so the thought of rolling the linen onto the comic book boards and standing it up so that at a glance I can see which linens have more yellow, or orange or gold tones, then look for something with more blue or green if that’s what I need. With it all stacked in the bins, whatever I take out, I need to put back where if I’m looking at it all standing up on the book boards, I don’t have to pull it out of the bin to get a good feel for how it’s going to look with the project.

So .. this afternoon I started putting my linen on the comic book boards.

See how easy it would be to choose linen when they’re all stored this way?

The next challenge was what to use for storing the linen.

As usually, look who’s right under my feet! 🙂

The storage bins I’ve been using are 16-1/2″ long x 13″ wide x 12-1/4″ tall. The length and width are perfect but I needed something about 8.5 to 9″ tall. I was thinking I’d have to stack the bins, like I do now and having 3″ dead space in each container is going to add a lot of wasted space so I began looking for something else.

Vince helped and found these Hefty Hi-Rise 40 quart storage bins.

These are 24″ x 16-3/4″ wide x 7.8″ tall. What I think I will do is make a couple of dividers and divide the length in half and that will give me two sections that are 12″ x 16-3/4″, with each compartment being about the same size as one of the Sterilite containers I’ve been using but shorter without the wasted height. Does that sound right? We had to order the containers and we won’t get them until next Thursday so I’ll keep rolling fabric onto comic book boards and be ready to fill the containers with linen when they arrive.