Hello!
I haven’t posted anything here in almost 18 months! That’s the entire time since my cancer diagnosis. The chemo gives me shaky hands, among other things, and I can’t do handwork right now. It’s a struggle even to rip seams I sew wrong, and sometimes I don’t guide a seam correctly through the sewing machine. Still, I’m sewing again. I have chemo scheduled through February, at least.
I decided I needed to do something with needlework, so I decided to organize my Valdani perle cotton threads. Rusty Crow Quilt Shop has a Valdani Tracker you can use to enter the type of Valdani thread, the number, and the size of the thread. Then you enter how many balls of that color you have, click Save Inventory. It saves to your personal tracker sheet, and even puts them in order after you enter them. How convenient is that? Plus there’s a reorder button and, at the bottom, some pre-selected tag categories for you to click and assign to that thread.
To see what you’ve entered, you switch from All Threads to My Threads and then you get a page like this screen shot of part of mine. I still have more to enter, but this is all that fit on the screen shot, so I wanted the picture at this moment. You can click to get it larger to see the print better.
Next, I’ll use this to make a spreadsheet to print and carry in my purse for when I stop at a quilt sop that carries Valdani perlé threads, just to make sure I don’t buy one I already had. It helped me to discover that I have two colors they don’t make any more. I have several balls of O775 turkey red, but they are in a container with my redwork project, because that’s the traditional turkey red for redwork.
Finally, I want to find a plastic storage box at Hobby Lobby that has squares big enough to hold one ball and organize these like I do the card bobbins for floss. I think it would be much faster to locate them in that kind of box than in the Acid Cigar boxes I have. They smell good after sitting in the box, and it probably keeps bugs out of it, but it could require emptying them all on the floor to find the right one! I don’t usually worry about the number identifier, because I choose my own colors to use. I’m not doing patterns that require only certain colors, so seeing the colors and then maybe recording the number, so I’ll remember, would be helpful.
If anyone knows the source of a box like that, the plastic with squares, not the cigar boxes, please leave it in the comment box. If you have access a 3D printer big enough to make something like that, it could be a new source of part-time work and income to make them for hand embroiderers! If Paul were around, he’d make me some wooden boxes, because he loved to make things I needed. But, alas, he’s still gone, going past the 12 years, six months mark on Sept. 26 of this year. 12 years, six months and 18 days. Yes, I still miss him.
But today, I’m looking for a plastic box and concentrating on more organizing. I need to do something better than the hole punched index cards for the Sassa Lynne perlé, too. That works okay, but it isn’t a perfect system, and I don’t live in the small town where the printer punched them for me any more, either. So I’ll do the part I can do and not worry about what I can’t do, right? Right!
CQ4Fun 