Quick & Dirty Thread Spool Rack

Is your sewing room a visible reminder of your failure to live like a grown, organized adult? This super easy, nearly free thread spool organizer will turn your tangled wads of thread, string, and shame into a functional, beautiful, pinteresting display of stability and mental health. No tools needed!

I managed to make these out of materials I sourced for free, and you might be able to, too. Big box home improvement stores often let you take a few paint stir sticks from the paint counter, Get the long ones if you can. I used four for two rows of spools.

My studio just so happens to be across the street from a golf course. If you have a golf course around, you may be able to do what I did: find a child to go to the golf course and collect abandoned golf tees. My mini-henchman had been collecting them for a while, so I had a bag full of them. They were all different colors and states of disrepair before I used them. If you don't have wood glue available, you might have PVA glue. Elmer's brand makes a variety called Glue All which is PVA. It works much better than the regular school glue.

• wooden paint stir sticks (often free at paint counter)
• old golf tees
• wood or PVA glue
• Pencil
• Ruler (optional)
• Spray paint (optional)

Using a pencil make a mark every two inches on the paint stir sticks, starting about an inch from the edge. Some paint stir sticks have ruler markings already on them, so you don't even need a ruler. If you can't find a ruler, use any 2" object to measure the distance between marks. The height of a standard thread spool is close enough. The important thing is to space them evenly.

Lay the marked stir sticks flat on a sheet of newspaper where they won't be disturbed for at least four hours. Put a big drop of glue on the wide part of each golf tee. Stand the golf tee upside-down on the marks you made on the stir stick, centered between its long edges. Let dry. If you want, you can connect two stir sticks together to make a long spool rack. I glued the ends of the stir sticks together, covered the join with cardstock (gluing it down flat, too), and clamped it together with binder clips to dry. It worked well and it's holding up six months later.

I decided to spray paint my spool racks white to match the peg board. You have to do this in at least two steps, because you can't get all sides of it without turning it over. Spray what you can, let it dry for an hour, then spray the rest. Let it dry completely, a couple of hours.

Load up your pretty new racks with thread spools. You can arrange them by color, line them up from oldest to newest, or whatever order pleases you most. I went with a color gradient and kept all the natural shades and black/white/grays in a basket under the pegboard. They are becoming a tangled rat's nest of despair again, so I need to make more of these.

My pegboard is in a space used by the public, so I wanted these racks to be secure and not come down when people removed or added spools, even if they didn't know it was a DIY rack held together with Elmer's glue. I used the pegboard hardware with two loops on each end, placing the bottom of the rack on the bottom loop and the last golf tee on the rack going through the top loop. It sagged a bit in the middle, but that was fixed by putting the other type of hook shown here in the middle. It's holding up very nicely, and it's proof that I'm a real, stable grown-up with an organized thread supply with a ROY G BIV color gradient, even. No, don't look over there at the fabric heap, Look at the thread spools!!