Organize It: The ribbon box

Today starts me cleaning of the catch all room.  As I've mentioned before we bought a much larger house to become our forever home.  It has rooms we don't even use.  Heck, the kitties have full reign of the 500 sq. ft basement that I rarely see.  The one thing I think our house is really missing is a proper mud room.  I live in Ohio people, 80% of the year the weather sucks and I have wet, muddy, or snowy shoes that need removed and a coat to take off and hang.  Our laundry room is right across from the door we enter through (from the garage) and we place all shoes and coats here.  But when I walk in the house with my arms full of stuff from shopping, it goes in the catch all room.

This is also known as the craft room, the office, the back room, the workout room....the list goes on.  We just got a cable box for back there so I've been spending more time in there cleaning up and organizing.  To organize the whole room though, there are a lot of little things I must organize first.  I'm getting there, tiny bits at a time.

Enough rambling.

For a few years now I've had a box thrown in with my scrapbook stuff where I store ribbon.  Spools, tiny pieces, from gifts, scraps I find.  Every little bit!  I started by throwing out the worthless stuff then went ahead organizing the rest.

Nothing too scary right?

WRONG!  Pop that bad boy open (well actually it wouldn't even shut) and you have an explosion!

I tried to roll them up then lay into the box, but they kept unrolling.  No bueno.

Laying nearby in the crafts pile were a bunch of twist ties left over from small clear plastic gift bags.  I usually use ribbon to tie them up instead but have kept the twist ties.  I decided to give them a go.

At first I wrapped it under and around, but I found that it was squeezing the ribbon too much.  If it stayed like that for a long time, when I go to unwrap and use sometime it wouldn't be smooth.

So I switched to tying from one side to the other.  I left it loose, squeezed it tight and then twisted.  These seemed to work great.  Bad description, let's look at some pictures.

Looking neat and pretty

Thick ribbon, thin ribbon

Rope and chord

Patterned and solid

Alright, that's starting to sound a bit like a Dr. Seuss book.

I organized it all.  Every last piece got wrangled up and twist tied.

Ahh, organized

I'm happy with the results and that everything now fits into the box.  Part of the reason the box never shut before though was because of the spools of ribbon I have.  A few I took off since there wasn't much left, but other larger rolls have been tossed into the crafts bin for now.  Organizing that is another day.

Nice.  Clean.  Organized.

And that my friends is the tale of the ribbon taming.

What are you organizing around your place?  Or are you waiting for Spring cleaning to really kick you in the butt?