Finally! This is a project that I started months and months and even more months ago. I got about halfway through it and decided it wasn’t fun anymore. I figured hey, it’s not too bad to dig through a bazillion ziploc bags to find the right color ribbon for a project, right? That’s not frustrating in the least little bit! {insert sarcasm here!} Honestly, it drove me crazy to KNOW that I had the perfect ribbon hiding somewhere in my stash and if I could just find it, my scrapbook layout or craft project or whatever I was working on would be magnificent! So, in the spirit of crossing stuff off my September Sort-it List, I finished organizing my ribbon. Hooray!
I’ve tried to organize the ribbon a couple of times before with different methods. Before I had a lot of ribbon, I left them on the spools and just had them all stuck into photo boxes. As my ribbon stash grew, I realized that method was NOT going to work. This was about the time that people were using glass canning jars to store the ribbon loosely sorted by color. The jars looked so pretty up on the shelves, I decided that was the way to go. Well, that worked pretty well for a while, but the jars took up quite a bit of prime shelf space. I also got tired of having to get a stool every time I needed a ribbon – and again as my ribbon stash grew, I realized that if that method was going to work, I was going to need more jars which was going to take up even more space.
Making Memories to the rescue! I bought a few color coordinated ribbon cards made my Making Memories and had a lightbulb moment. A-HA!! Homemade ribbon cards! I can make those myself, and I can do it cheaply! I already had tons of chipboard that I had been saving from numerous scrapbooking paper packs over the years. I couldn’t bear to throw them away, I just knew they would be good for something someday. I was right! I tell ya, it pays to be a packrat. Ok, so I studied the Making Memories card and studied the ribbon I had and went to work drawing out my template for a ribbon card. I was able to get 4 ribbon cards out of each 12×12 sheet of chipboard. For each card I just cut notches to fit each width of ribbon I wanted on the card. Pretty soon I figured out that I had a lot of different colors of ribbon but they were mostly the same 3 or 4 widths, so I got good at cutting those notches. Now I have 3 boxes full of wonderfully, coordinated, organized ribbon!