My new ribbon hang-up

For someone who doesn’t use much ribbon, I certainly have a lot of it. I like ribbon. I like to buy it. I like to collect it. And I like to look at it. Add to this the fact that I can’t bring myself to part with even small pieces of ribbon, and it’s a bit of a problem.

The Problem
Over the years, I’ve tried several methods of organizing my ribbon, but it wasn’t until recently that I found one that could accommodate my burgeoning collection.

My first ribbon purchases were by the yard. I cut rectangles of cardboard and wrapped the ribbons around them, securing the ends with a bit of clear tape. I stored these little bundles in a clear plastic shoebox, neatly labeled with a Dymo label.

The shoebox system worked for a while, until I started buying spools of ribbon. It seemed pointless to take the ribbon off the spool and wind it around a piece of cardboard, so I kept the spools. Hence I needed a second shoebox for the spools.

The dual-shoebox system worked for a while, until I started accumulating small scraps of ribbon. I shoved these into a mason jar on my windowsill. I liked the way it looked, so I bought several more mason jars and sorted the ribbon scraps by color. As I acquired new ribbons, I put them in the jars, which looked pretty on my windowsill.

The dual-shoebox-plus-mason-jar system worked for a while, until my manufacturer design team started sending me ribbon. Lots of ribbon. Long, long pieces of ribbon that were clearly not going to fit into my already stuffed mason jars. I wanted to keep these ribbons separate from my main collection anyway, so I grouped them by type or theme, fastened each group with a one-inch butterfly clip, threaded the clips onto binder rings, and hung the rings on the back of my scrap room door.

Then I took a good look at my dual-shoebox-plus-mason-jar-plus-hanging-butterfly-clip system and realized . . . it wasn’t working.

Read on to see my new organizational system.

The Solution
Have you seen the new ribbon-storage system with two- or three-inch binder rings and clear plastic tags with slits? You thread each piece of ribbon through the slits in a tag, hang the tags on the binder rings, and hang the binder rings on your wall. The ribbon is visible and accessible, and it doesn’t get creased. Genius!

I knew the system would work for me because it was similar to what I was already doing with my design team ribbon. I loved the idea of the individual tags. They would fit better on the binder rings than the butterfly clips did, and it would be easy to add and remove individual ribbons. But my frugal Yankee nature would not permit me to purchase the commercial product when I could easily make my own.

Here’s how I did it.

I began with an oversized binder ring that came with a ribbon collection from Crate Paper. I cut dozens (okay, hundreds) of 1.25 x 2-inch tags from scraps of white cardstock and punched a hole in the top of each tag. This sounds tedious, but it wasn’t too bad. Using the Crop-a-Dile, I was able to punch through several tags at a time.

Then it was a simple matter of stapling each type of ribbon to a separate tag, labeling it with the manufacturer, if known, and threading it onto the binder ring.

The tags work fine for very thin and very thick ribbon, and for everything in between. Most of my ribbons are three or four feet long. I cut longer pieces in half and staple both pieces to the same tag.

I have two of these binder rings hanging inside the doors of my storage armoire, where I can see them when I’m working and shut them out of view when I’m not. I’m slowly emptying my shoeboxes, but I think I’ll keep one mason jar for scraps.

The downside of this system is that it’s not exactly portable. This isn’t a problem for me, because I don’t feel the need to travel with all of my ribbon, but it might be a concern for others.

Copyright © 2008 by Judith Mara.