Those are my spool racks, mounted above the bulletin board, in front of my sewing machine, in the closet under the stairs.
Closet is an odd term, it is actually a little room, but we call it 'the closet under the stairs'.
Middle went through and sorted spools by color.
Putting a lot of spools, which had been cluttering my sewing table, away in the process.
Nice and neat. Easy to find the right color. It is very rare that I have to buy the right color, usually we have it.
I do not sew for leisure any longer.
I sew to hem, mend, add straps, alter.
That is the ending half of the spools of thread story.
The first part of the story is, before middle even started tidying the spools to the finished state in the above picture, I started a spool donation bag.
One of the local high schools still has a sewing program.
I actually used to teach quilting in that same room at that same school, evenings, long ago.
When I started the spool donation bag, I would look at the number of spools I had, decide I probably did not need 15 spools of white thread any more (I did when I was quilting all the time), and throw a few in the bag.
Then when middle was seriously tidying my spools (while I was working on a couple of her skirts at the sewing machine), she starting adding multiples to the donation bag in earnest.
She separated the spools into colors, looked to see if there were any exact duplicates (in colors other than white, black) and then only kept one of each color. And she pruned down the number of whites and blacks even further.
Last week, every day, I had multiple things in my car we had cleaned out of a closet or shelf that I was passing on to someone else. (Several trips to GoodWill.)
When I pulled into the school lot, to drop of the spool donation bag, I thought - I wonder how many spools ARE in that bag?
I dumped them on the passenger seat.
Then I counted as I refilled the bag.
48 spools of thread were donated to the school. Doesn't look like it in the picture does it? When I started counting, I guessed half that amount. When I later asked middle, she guessed 50.
The spools from the picture at the top of the page are the ones we kept.
There are 105 spools in that (kept) picture.
We found (even) more as we kept cleaning that closet.
Yes, different colors are very necessary for mending, hemming, alterations, etc. And pretty much all of those colors get used, one time or another. But we did not need three spools of the exact same gold (for example).
I used to sew my way through whole spools of thread within a couple days (working on quilts or hemming massive amounts of baby blankets or the like).
I have not bought a spool of (any kind of) thread in many, many years.
I sent all my (specialty) quilting threads to a fellow blogger who happens to quilt, several years ago.
So, once upon a time, there were lots more spools of thread than what is covered in the pictures (above).
