Craft Hint

Today, I had an epiphany. I was tired. My circadian rhythms are off and I am getting to bed early and rising even earlier. It was 5:00 AM and I woke up and wanted to organize my container of ribbon. Ribbon had been on my mind because I had to stop off at M&J trim to get me some 1/4" ribbon for a accordion book project that has been vexing me. I will share that project with you on Friday. Because I ordered so much ribbon, this was what I was given.

Yes--an absolute mess. Now granted, this is only part of the mess because it didn't dawn on me to take a picture before I started the organizing. Anyway, I knew that there had to be a better way to organize the ribbon than to leave it loose like this. I decided to make some ribbon paddles out of scrap book board that I had been saving. I usually save all of the off cuts of paper and book board until they are absolutely too small to use for anything else. Here is a photo of my trash bin filled with the book board off cuts.

There was no precision to the project. I simply started cutting pieces of book board in 2.5" by 5.5" sizes. I was planning on storing the ribbon in some small snack size ziploc bags that I had in the kitchen. When I was learning about portion control for my diabetes, I had to portion out snacks into these snack size bags. Of course, me being one to go overboard, I bought boxes of these bags to use only to find out that I only needed them for about one month. So, I now had another purpose for these bags.

I wrapped the ribbon around the paddle (btw, it is easier to turn the paddle rather than wrap the ribbon around the paddle), placed it into its little bag and then moved on. The final result--

The beauty of this project is that all of your ribbon remains wrinkle free, easy to handle and lies flat in the container. I am now wrapping all of my ribbon like this. This will reduce the space taken up by spools of ribbon which is a big waste of space.