Stitch bow style floss holder spools

thingiverse

These are 'long spools' for holding embroidery floss straight from the skein, similar to DMC's 'stitch bow' storage system. Some positive features of these long spools are: 1. They can hold multiple skeins without bulging, if you're like me and accidentally double-purchased a colour. 2. They have a ring so that you can string them onto a big loop of wire for storage, or put them on hooks on a corkboard or pegboard. 3. The floss is flat on the spool, which means that the spools won't get hung up on each other when they're on a ring. 4. The top of a spool acts like a big swatch so that you can see the colours all lined up together on a ring. 5. You can trap the skein label inside the spool itself so that it won't slip off. 6. You can make these spools as short or long as you want by cutting the beams to your chosen length. 7. It's very fast and easy to wind floss onto a long spool. My wrists hurt a little from winding floss onto cards, but not with these! 8. The small 'horn' is a secure way to both start and finish winding. - **To start winding:** Put the tail on the front of the spool's top beam, starting from about halfway. Bring the thread from the front of the spool, through the horn, and to the back. Start winding the floss on, trapping the tail underneath the wraps. - **To finish winding:** Wrap the tail around the width of the spool near the top, until you have 5 cm (2 in) of tail left. Tie a rope-end clove hitch onto the horn, which will undo itself when you slip the loop off the horn with your fingernail. <https://www.animatedknots.com/clove-hitch-knot-rope-end> A negative feature of this spool is that the skein label is free to rotate and you will probably have to spin the label around to read it. This is fine for me because a) I am making patterns and I care more about the colour itself versus its code, and b) searching for codes isn't a very common task anyway compared to stitching. --- ### Assembly To make 1 spool, you will need: - 2x lengths of bamboo kitchen skewer, cut to desired length. I chose 13 cm (5 1/8 in) lengths because I could cut two of those from one bamboo skewer. - 2x `spool.stl` for the outer diameter of your bamboo skewer. I include STLs for 4 skewer diameters: 1.75 mm, 2.0 mm, 2.5 mm, and 3.0 mm. Simply push the skewers into the holes until they bottom out. Don't forget to put the skein label on the outside skewer (the side without the storage ring)! Do not glue the skewers into the holes; even if the printed part literally just falls off the skewer, winding the thread onto it will keep it all securely together. Not gluing the skewers in will also let you remove the skein label and reuse the spool for another colour.