Ribbon, Ribbon, and More Ribbon

I should be vacuuming because my mother-in-law arrives for a visit sometime this afternoon. But I just got the mail and look what was in it from my great friend Lori! Yes, it's just 1/4" satin ribbon. Nothing exotic as far as ribbon goes, but I still LOVE her for sending it to me. See she knows that I live in a ribbon deprived town. The only store that sells ribbon by the spool is Walmart and they rarely have anything but the basic colors. So Lori bought all of these yummy colored ribbons for me in Idaho and sent them all the way to me! What a sweetheart!

I love ribbons. At the all day crop that I attended the ladies running the crop announced that they were having a ribbon sale and that all of the ribbon would be half off! Yikes! I was one of the first ladies at the ribbon aisle. I had so many spools of ribbon that one of the other ladies was kind enough to get me a basket to carry it all in. I got all of this delicious polka dotted, velvet, striped, and gingham ribbon for less than $20! I would have gotten more, but there were others waiting and I thought that it would look a little piggish. As it was, the lady cutting the ribbon looked at my like I was crazy when I asked if I could have 5 yards of the black with the white polka dots. But it was only 37 cents a yard!!

Now all of these awesome ribbons will need to join my collection. I actually have my ribbon pretty well organized. I keep the heavier ones like grosgrain in quart size acrylic canisters from Walmart. I love the look of glass jars, but envisioned my kids breaking one and bleeding all of the ribbon inside the jar! I wouldn't know whether to bandage the kid's hand or try to wash the blood out of the ribbon first. That wouldn't do! So I was very happy when I found these acrylic canisters with a similar look.

The rest of my ribbon -- satins, sheers -- is stored in a drawer. I took most of it off the spools to save space. Plus it lets me see exactly how much of any one I have -- I hate to run out of a ribbon in the middle of making swap cards. I rolled each ribbon into a loop and just tied off the end of the loop to itself. Then I separated the ribbons by color family into the plastic boxes that my larger stamp sets came in. Another reason to love unmounted stamps stored in CD cases -- I get to reuse the boxes for great storage! It took some time to do this, but I'm so much happier with it than all of the other systems that I have tried before for organizing my ribbon.

The only problem that I had with this system is when I tried to use ribbon at my first class and it wasn't on the spool anymore. The ladies at the class had the sheer white ribbon all unrolled and tangled. But my amazing friend Lori came up with a brilliant idea to solve this problem. She suggested using a box that our gift with purchase stamps come in to hold the loop of ribbon. If you cut a slit through the end of the box you have an automatic dispenser!! I tried it at my last class with some of the ribbons and it worked great. Here's a photo of a loop of grosgrain in a little larger box.