A while ago I bought a bunch of StitchBow Floss Holders from DMC when I was kitting my HAED Teddy Bear Stocking. The pattern calls for so many different colours that it required proper organization of the floss. I also bought a couple of the large plastic wallets that take 15 StitchBows. I am quite happy with the StitchBows, but I find the plastic wallets unpractical. It is difficult to put the StitchBows back in their pockets and the binder becomes too space demanding and hard to manage when it is open. I really wanted some kind of box that gave me a better overview of my stash. So I spent a couple of hours searching the Internet.
I first discovered that DMC used to make a box for StitchBow storage, but it is discontinued, so my search continued. After a while I found an online cross stitch store in South Korea that had exactly what I was looking for. The shop is called Yeidam Cross Stitch. They had plastic boxes that could take 100 StichBows each. The boxes can be seen here.
I have to admit that I was sceptical of ordering from South Korea, and the payment method was not very good. But the boxes weren’t very expensive, so I decided to take risk, and potentially eat the loss, and I ordered five boxes. That should be enough for the entire DMC line with room to spare.
It turned that I had worried needlessly and the boxes arrived in good condition. They took a while to arrive, but I believe the delay can attributed to transport and customs control.
when I first got the boxes I only had the materials for the HAED Teddy Bear Stocking and the first Passione Ricamo mystery, and I kept each kit in a seperate box.
This is a photo of my kit for the Passione Ricamo Fairy Mystery SAL 2012-2013. I removed the inside tray to make room for the bead jars, but I didn’t really need the tray for this one so it was not a problem.
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This is a photo of the thread for the HAED Teddy Bear Tree Stocking. I managed to fit all the floss in one box. It was a tight fit, but I got it all in and I find it a lot easier to use than the binder and plastic wallets.
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I have since bought more materials and I have found that I ended up using a little bit of one skein and a little bit of another one in the same color for another project, and this annoyed me as well as made it impossible to keep track of what I have. I have now put all my DMC into the boxes in numerical order. If a pattern calls for several skeins of one color over a large area, like a background, I will buy the skeins for that and keep them with the project, but for everything else I just use from the boxes. This is what they look like now.
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Yeidam also has smaller boxes, and I considered buying them for smaller projects, but for the moment I don’t see the need. I bought a DMC Gold Series StitchBow roll recently and I think it will serve my needs for transporting a project and if I want to keep a kit seperated I just use a ZipLock bag.
The only drawback of using the StitchBows is that I have not found a good way to keep leftover threads, so currently I just keep each thread in a small ZipLock with the number tag from the skein. This means that I can re-use the bags later for other threads, but it might get to chaotic and will need a revision later.
As I have recently bought my first silks I think I will use Floss-a-Way bags for those, but I have not made a definite decision yet.