I was going to sew pockets on the felt sheets but then I thought, maybe there is something that already has pockets. It turns out that plastic pages for holding 35 mm slides have the right size pockets, but the camera store that used to be near us is gone, and I couldn’t wait, so I went to Hobby Lobby and got some coin pages instead, which also have 2″ pockets. They are pretty heavy duty plastic; probably heavier than slide pages would be. I am not sure which is preferable.

I stuck a floss label at the top of each pocket. I had a sheet of self-adhesive felt (with a peel-off backing) which I cut into small pieces and stuck to the pockets below the labels. These will hold the threaded needles. (White felt would have been more attractive but black was what I had, and after the minor miracle of being able to FIND it, it would have been a shame not to use it.) I put the pages into a 3-ring binder and ta-da!

After working with this for an evening, I felt that there was one thing missing — tabs, so I can turn to the right page. I got these at Office Depot:

I think they’re meant to be stuck to the front of the page (because one side of the tab is easier to write on than the other) but I hadn’t left room so I stuck them on the back. Now my book looks like this:

Each tab has on it the range of numbers on the NEXT page. I didn’t get that right at first. You don’t need a tab for the first page because it’s right there when you open the book. The tab on the first page has the numbers for the second page, so when you open to that tab, it’s the second page. It’s hard to explain, but think about using tabbed dividers — you put the divider BEFORE the page you want to open to.

This is pretty nice now. With the parking, I have lots of colors going at once and although the needle book is a little cumbersome, it is much faster to find the right bobbin/needle than searching through the jumble of active bobbins I was keeping in a shallow box. It is also faster to jab the needle into the little felt swatch than to wind the floss around the slots in the bobbin (which is what I was doing with the threaded needles before). Because of the plastic behind the felt, you can do it one-handed. If you can’t find the self-stick felt, you could use velcro dots (just the soft side).

Update 5/8/12: Another thing further experience has taught: Put the numbers for the current page on the back of the tab. So the tab on page 1 would have the numbers for page 2 on its front, and the numbers for page 1 on the back. This way when you are open to a later page, you can get back to an earlier one without hunting.

Further update: 5/9/12: When I sat down to stitch last night, the first needle I took up was gummy. So instead of spending half an hour stitching, I spent half an hour using Goo Gone on my needles and putting them back in the felt making sure that they didn’t get down into the adhesive. I think the best option, therefore, is to use adhesive velcro dots. They have a tightly woven back between the fuzzy stuff and the adhesive. You could perhaps glue plain felt to the sheets, but that seems like a lot of work with a doubtful outcome. I tried superglue, which at least dries hard, but it didn’t hold the felt very firmly, and if I superglued 100 pieces of felt I’d end up with all my fingers glued together.

One more thing: 5/14/12 I found adhesive velcro strips which I can cut into rectangles that will be a better shape for needles than dots (and more cost-effective). I’ve also discovered it’s a good idea to loop the floss once around the needle to keep it from coming off when I flip pages.

First, the felt. It is “made in the USA of 100% eco-fi (polyester made from recycled post-consumer plastic bottles)”. While this sounds good in theory, it’s irregular in thickness, slick-feeling, and just plain nasty. You can see how plasticky it looks, and the floss labels don’t stick to it as well as they might. This is all JoAnn and Michael’s had. I don’t know if anyone has cotton felt anymore — maybe you can buy it by the yard if not by sheet (I didn’t look at the yard goods at JoAnn). If not, I’ll probably get some flannel and sew it into a double thickness.

Second, if you want to put your “pages” into a notebook, cut the felt so that it fits before you do anything else. These felt sheets were 9″ x 12″. The width was OK but I should have cut the sheet to 11″ so it didn’t stick out past the end of the notebook.

I had a bunch of 1/4″ grommets so that’s what I used but this limited me to a pretty small binder. Most of my binders have rings that are too big for 1/4″ grommets. (SOMEONE who lives here but is not me ruined my grommet hole-making tool — looks like he hammered it. What on earth? I don’t know if it would have been able to cut through this plastic felt even if the edge was intact.) If you want to use grommets and don’t already have some, they do come in bigger sizes.

I intended to use a portrait orientation so that’s why the labels are attached the way they are. (Be careful not to stick the first label too close to the edge. I did and had to move the whole first row, which doesn’t improve their stickiness.) Once I was done with the labels and the safety pins, I started looking for a notebook and realized it would be nicer if the notebook was set up like an easel. (I actually have a notebook that stands up — the cover is hinged horizontally and it stands on the edge of the cover with the spine as another leg. But the rings are too big for my grommets.) Turning a standard binder sideways will work — you just need to tether the covers together about 6-8″ apart so it will stand up without collapsing.

Because of the way I stitch (lots of parking and no leaving vertical gaps) I often have 2 or 3 lengths of a symbol, so I need someplace to store these as well as a threaded needle. I guess if I really had a LOT of needles I could just put them all in the needle book, but what I have been doing is storing all the lengths on a bobbin, and only leaving one threaded into a needle. I thought I would use safety pins to wrap the extra lengths of floss so I bought a box of quilter’s basting pins. This turned out not to work very well. For one thing, they’re too crowded. It’s awkward to wrap floss onto the safety pins when they’re so close together, and spacing them farther apart didn’t really help. It’s just difficult to wrap floss around something that’s fastened down. And the pins are really too short. It’s a lot of wrapping.

This also suggests that wrapping the floss around a threaded needle may not really be that great an idea. My experience with having a lot of colors parked is that while the floss looks like it’s in a terrible snarl, most of the time I can pull the strand I need free without any problems.

My next idea was attach bobbins to the felt. I sewed 4 bobbins to another sheet to play around with but this seems very awkward too. (And the sewing would be a whole separate issue, but one I don’t need to solve, now.)

I am currently playing around with attaching bobbins with velcro. If you put the hook side on the back of a plastic bobbin, it will stick to the felt. (It probably needs to be a plastic bobbin or a thick cardboard bobbin so it doesn’t get bendy from being pulled off.) Unfortunately, with this felt at least, only a few times of pulling the velcro away creates a long tail of loose felt fibers. It looks like a better approach is to put the hook side on the felt, and the soft side on the back of a bobbin. The velcro sticks well to the felt and to the bobbin, but the bobbin can be pulled off easily (I’m using half of a 1/2″ dot). I could use my existing bobbins which already have the labels on them. The velcro needs to be near the top of the bobbin so that the floss, wrapped at the bottom of the bobbin, doesn’t risk getting caught on the hook side of the velcro.

Or I could just get a LOT more needles to allow for having 2 or 3 threaded per symbol. Right now that sounds the simplest.

Last idea: you know the tabbed dividers you can get for 3-ring binders? You can get just the tabs, with peel-off sticky backs, to stick to anything you like. Those would be nice (I think) to label the range of numbers on a page so you can flip directly to the page you need.

Incidentally, I did look a long time at the foam sheets — some people have commented they stick their needles into labeled foam sheets. It seems like that wouldn’t work unless you got them ALL onto one page, and that seems like it would be awfully crowded. But clearly, it works for some people, and I haven’t tried it (yet).

An even better way is to make a needle book out of felt sheets! Not a little bitty needle book like you might have for sewing needles. Buy several sheets of felt. They are approximately 9 x 12 inches. You can use safety pins to fasten them into a book, or use 1/4″ metal grommets and binder rings (or just put them in a 3-ring binder). Then, using our floss labels, stick the labels to the floss sheets in rows in numerical order. Leave the length of a needle between the rows (she says she discovered the needles should be stuck in from top to bottom, i.e. pointing down). It looks like this:

She says “I am constantly combing the threads down but they still get all tangled together. That’s OK though. I can still pull out the color I need.”

If you put the needles in horizontally, you could get a lot more per page (my needles are only a little longer than the floss labels are wide). I don’t know if they would tend to come out, but you could also wrap the floss tail around the needle, like this:

This is on a dishtowel — I don’t have any felt right now. This should keep the needle from coming out accidentally and it would solve most of the tangled tail problems. It does take extra time to wrap the floss on, but surprisingly, you don’t have to UNwrap it. Just pull the needle through. Even with a long piece like this, it comes easily!

You do need a needle for EVERY symbol, so you don’t want to be buying your needles 6 at a time. You need bulk needles and here are a few places you can get them:

Anita Little Stitches – Bohin and John James packs of 25 or 50
Nordic Needle – Colonial size 24 only, pack of 1000
Stitchtastic (UK) – unspecified brand, packs of 50, 100, or 500
John James (UK) – packs of 1000

or search for “bulk tapestry needles”, “1000 needles” etc. but be aware that some sellers of needles in bulk don’t sell to consumers. (I got Bohin needles from Anita Little Stitches and they are really nice needles. I mean they’re really nice. Too good for me — I keep dropping them and rolling my chair over them.) I believe John James are also good needles. I have no experience with Colonial needles. All the above vendors ship worldwide. Maybe sometime I’ll get a bunch of different needles and see how they stack up!

(If you’re coming late to the party, Easy-Count Guideline is a red plastic monofilament “thread” which comes on a spool in a little enclosed drum. The thread feeds out of a little hole in the drum.)

I read a post in the forums at some point in which someone stated that she uses Easy-Count Guideline but because it’s so expensive, she saves and reuses it. So how expensive is it? Well, it lists for $9 for 100 yards. $9 isn’t huge, but it is kind of a lot for a notion. Sewing thread is about $1.12 for 100 yards. DMC embroidery floss is about $4 for 100 yards. So what is so special about Easy-Count Guideline? I bought a spool to find out.

It says “Patent Pending”. I’m not sure what they’re patenting here. They didn’t invent monofilament line. True, the little box is pretty cool — if you’ve ever used nylon “invisible” thread, you know that as soon as you loosen the end, it starts unspooling itself like crazy, and that’s not an issue with this packaging. If you read their web site, you would think that they invented gridding. Almost none of the benefits they list are unique to Easy-Count Guideline. The only advantage it has over anything else you might use to grid is that it is really, really strong. You can’t pierce it with a needle, so you can leave it in until you’re finished stitching … completely finished. I feel fairly confident in saying that you won’t be able to pull this stuff hard enough to break it. I am not as confident that if you leave it under 500 stitches that you will be strong enough to pull it out. In the limited testing I’ve done, you have to pull hard to get it moving but it is slippery so once started it comes out fairly easily. But I don’t trust that I would be able to get it out from under a whole row of stitches, so I’m basically removing it as I go. I am also stitching on 22-count Hardanger cloth currently, and the Guideline takes up a lot of room. If I stitch over it, it raises the stitches a little, and in these cramped quarters it’s tricky getting past it.

I wondered why you wouldn’t just use some other, less expensive, plastic thread, maybe something that comes in multiple colors (I am hugely sold on color gridding). I went to JoAnn and was surprised to find that aside from the “invisible” nylon thread (which is unsuitable for gridding for obvious reasons) there is actually no non-spun sewing thread. I did get a spool of Sulky Sliver (also something I read about in the forums) but I couldn’t find it locally. It is a “thin, flat ribbon-like polyester film that is metalized with aluminum to make it brilliantly reflective”, according to Sulky. It comes in lots of colors and it’s probably not possible to pierce it with a tapestry needle, so you could stitch over it, and it’s about $1.88 per 100 yards. It’s pretty strong, but not as strong as Easy-Count Guideline. MRA was able to break a length of it, which he couldn’t do with the Guideline. Would it break being pulled out from under a lot of stitching? Let me know if you try it — I’m not going to. I do like it for the page boundaries with my color gridding — the metallic thread really stands out and since it’s more plastic than metallic, it’s easy to work with.

But back to Easy-Count Guideline — how is it any different from fishing line? I went to Academy to find out.

It turns out that a lot of fishing line is colorless, but it does come in red and green. I got red, 8-pound line, which was the lightest they had in stock. It was $1.50 per 100 yards. (Look for monofilament line, not “braided”.) It is a transparent red, while the Easy-Count Guideline is more opaque, but it’s hard to see a difference on fabric.

The top one is Guideline; the lower one is fishing line. It’s pretty hard to see any difference. The threads going vertically are sewing thread, and this is 22-count Hardanger cloth. The Guideline might be a teeny bit softer but they both tend to kink at the end of stitches. Fishing line comes in lighter weights and 6- or 4-pound might be better. The fishing line was taped to the spool and it does start unspooling the second the tape is off, whereas Guideline has that coolio box … but I put the fishing line inside a zip-loc bag and poked the end through the bag, and now it can just live in there and do its thing. (If I wanted to futz, I could probably make a sleeve for the fishing line like the Guideline has.) The Guideline also has extensive instructions — seriously. And not altogether helpful instructions, in my opinion. They assume your pattern will not have a 10 x 10 grid and want you grid from the center out and then mark the pattern to match your fabric. Obviously, you need to make the fabric grid match your pattern grid, and the center point is quite possibly not at the intersection of two bold lines. Probably the key point is to take long stitches since this material strains the fabric. They want you to have 6 stitch lengths on top and 4 underneath so you have a series of broken boxes to match the grid in the pattern, like this:

I could not find Easy-Count Guideline at JoAnn or Michael’s, but a shop specializing in needlework might have it, and it’s easily found online. Is the nice packaging worth $7.50? That’s what it boils down to, that and the fact that anyplace that sells sporting goods will have fishing line.

One last note from a reader, beading supply stores sell a product similar to Guideline in a variety of colors for a much lower price. It’s called nylon beading cord. It may not be available at general craft stores but you can easily find it online.

It’s hard to be rational about all this. One person I talked to said that she hated to leave her house because then she would not be able to protect it. Fire is apparently the monster under the bed of my mind — when we return from a trip I always half expect to find the house burned down. From what, I don’t know — not wildfires, since these were such a shock. Tornadoes are much more likely here and yet I don’t worry much about them, nor have I ever considering making an evacuation kit or even list in the event of a tornado. We don’t have a basement and in the event of a tornado you’re supposed to go into a bathroom, preferably one with no windows, and hang onto the pipes (picture me lying on the floor in the bathroom clinging to the pipes under the sink as the house blows away over me). The most worrying I have ever done about that scenario is to wonder how we would get all three cats into that bathroom, particularly the one who won’t allow us to pick her up.

Here are the conclusions I’ve come to mulling all this over.

I should make a detailed, prioritized list of the things we would want to gather up if we needed to get out. To the extent possible, the things on the list should be already gathered/packed and ready to go. (Picture albums, which we rarely look at, could be packed — art on the walls could not, unless we want to let a possible disaster run our lives.) I found a good sample list and thoughts on an emergency plan here. One thing I would grab for sure would be the computer (just the box, not the peripherals) and lots of the things on that list are on the computer. Or in the safe deposit box — but I hadn’t thought of taking the key!

For me, the main things to save would be the cats, photo albums (and I’ve been scanning those and putting them online), needlework (finished and un), art, some jewelry and heirlooms, the computer. My grandmother was a big collector of glass and crystal, and I have some of her things. I would hate to lose them but it’s hardly the kind of thing you can take if you’re fleeing for your life.

Which led me to the thought: there’s so much STUFF around here. The vast majority of it is never used and I wish there were a lot less of it. Admittedly, it’s much easier for me to identify things belonging to MRA that should go away (it’s my stuff but his junk) and he probably feels the same way about my things. In some cases I can see it: there’s a needleboard for pressing velvet without crushing it which I used for making a velvet jacket, what, 30 years ago? Am I really ever going to make anything out of velvet again? I know some people say “If you haven’t used it in a year, get rid of it.” But there ARE things that we actually do use only once every few years, but that would be expensive to replace, like the sleeping bags. Do we really need an entire wall of computer science books that are rarely referred to? Clearly not, but then those belong to MRA.

One of the things I have put off doing, over and over, is a household inventory. You’re supposed to do that, right? So I bought one of those little books where you can go room to room and write down all the things in that room. Would you like my little book? It’s in new condition. But it would not be that much work to take digital photos of everything, mess and all, and burn a CD or two. (Once, MANY years ago, MRA spent a day getting things out, taking pictures, putting them away, and finally he began to wonder why the roll of film in the camera wasn’t used up. Then he discovered that there WAS no film in the camera. Bless his heart, he put film in and did it all again. We still have those pictures in the safe deposit box, but many of the things IN the pictures are gone. I wouldn’t go to that much trouble — just point the camera into closets and cupboards.) But in reality, although it’s hard to make up my mind that I NO LONGER NEED any given item, there are lots of things that I certainly wouldn’t replace if they were gone, and that’s an easier way to think about it. So I should still take the pictures for insurance purposes, but maybe I can start slowly getting rid of things I wouldn’t replace. If it makes me happy to own something that falls into that category, for some reason, I don’t have to get rid of it (yet) — there are plenty of things I’m not especially attached to. Baby steps!

All the yellow, orange, and green spots are various fires, and the quince flower is where we are. We got a lot of wind but no rain with Hurricane Lee, which made landfall in Louisiana and went east. The fires were made much worse by all the wind, and the fact that it basically hasn’t rained here in a year. I completely freaked out when I found out about them and was getting all set to evacuate. Once I realized that they were not actually heading toward us, I calmed down. It has been amazingly difficult to get information (or accurate information). The Weather Underground web site, for example, has staunchly insisted that we were having winds of 1 mile per hour even as the fire reports said the winds were 25-35 mph. Fortunately, the wind is gone, so I hope they will start to be able to contain these fires.

The large fire to the east of us started in the Lost Pines, which is a stand of loblolly pines which are the remnants of pine forest which covered much of Texas during the Ice Age. All but 100 of 6000 acres have burned. I suppose there have been wildfires there before so I hope it will come back. Here’s a video of how fast the fire spread.

I’ve moved the color swatches on the labels to the bottom (under the numbers). I think this makes more sense for filing, since it puts the numbers at the tippy-top of the folded label. It seems to me that the colors grab the eye no matter where they are, but what can you do.

I heard from someone who uses the giftwrap tape to keep her labels attached that it sticks better to plastic bobbins than the regular tape, and that’s the reason she uses it.

I tried another approach to helping the labels stick: I scuffed up both sides of the top of a plastic bobbin with a nail file. I didn’t expect this to help because one side is already textured, and the other is smooth, and the current labels didn’t stick well to either. But when I tried to remove the label I put on the scuffed-up bobbin a week or two ago, I had the devil of a time getting it off. None of my labels stick that well to unscuffed bobbins! If I was going to try this on a larger scale, I would use a piece of steel wool (moderately fine grit — the kind for sanding, not the kind for dishes — and make sure it was leaving visible scratches) and do both sides at a time. I’d then rinse the bobbins in water to get all the dust off (and dry them, of course) before attaching labels.

However, I am hoping that none of this will be necessary with the labels with the “more aggressive” adhesive. I still haven’t received the samples I requested and was running out of time to order new labels, so I just took a leap of faith and ordered a batch of that kind. That was yesterday, so my samples will probably come today. Keep your fingers crossed for sticking power!

There’s still a lot of work to do before the color labels will be available, but we’ll try to get them out soon.

Update: the samples did come today, and they are much stickier. Will they stay permanently stuck to plastic bobbins? Time will tell, but they will definitely stay stuck longer than the current labels.

I called my label supplier today and explained the problem and asked what they would recommend. They explained that sticking to plastic is tricky because plastic, being a petroleum product, emits vapors which acts against the adhesive. They do have a type of label I haven’t tried yet, which I’m told has their “most aggressive adhesive”. I’ve requested samples and I really hope this solves the problem. (I still have a lot of cardboard bobbins, but I bought 1000 plastic bobbins from Nordic Needle and as I finish the floss on a cardboard bobbin, I’m replacing it with plastic.) My bobbins have a fairly large hole in the top, so I press the two sides of the label together at the hole, so it’s sticking to itself. This insures that the label won’t hop right off the bobbin, but the corners still lift, and pick up cat hair and what have you and that just makes the lifting problem worse.

One person told me she uses Scotch Giftwrap tape (in the purple dispenser) to attach her labels to plastic bobbins and she has no problem with them coming off. I was thinking that that was a double-sided tape, but it doesn’t seem to be, so now I’m not sure what the special advantage of that tape would be, unless it’s that it disappears better than standard tape. I don’t know if it’s stickier. But I hate to tell people they need to use tape on supposedly sticky labels, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for “aggressive adhesive”.

If you look carefully, you can see the label edges — the bottoms of the labels are just below the numbers. They’re laid out like the current labels, but just have color swatches above the numbers. These are about actual size (the labels are 1″ wide by 5/8″ high). The color is better than it appears — for example, 939 and 3021 are clearly different colors on the real labels.

There’s some work to do before we can make them available, but here’s what we’re thinking, and we’d like to know how you feel about the whole thing.

1. It may not be necessary to have a color swatch for the solid colors, especially the ones that don’t have a symbol, but it seems like it can’t hurt.
2. The color labels may cost slightly more than all black labels, but not much.
3. We will discontinue all black labels. These seem like a huge improvement and having two kinds would be confusing. (I’d start using them this instant but the current label stock is not suitable for color printing — it smears.)
4. We will have a coupon for some period of time to allow people (especially people who JUST bought all black labels) to get the color labels at a good discount.
5. They may not be water-proof. (The current ones happen to be, although it has never come up, for me.)

None of this is set in stone (yet). What are your opinions, questions, concerns?

I’m not sure how this happened. I may have parked a needle in the wrong place, although I think I’m really pretty careful about that. Much more often, I think, I just put floss back onto the wrong bobbin. I don’t know how I do that. I think maybe I look at the right bobbin and then pick up a different one. That sounds odd but I’ve caught myself doing it. Then later I notice I have 4 colors of floss on one bobbin, or I pick a bobbin up and realize that the color on it is clearly wrong (like a light color with a dark symbol, or vice versa). Sometimes I can figure out what the symbol for the floss should have been and sometimes I just have to throw the floss away because I don’t know what it is.

Earlier today, I thought, “I should snip half an inch of the two colors of floss on each bobbin and tape it to the bobbin.” That would be a way to check whether I was putting floss on the right bobbin. And even if I still put it on the wrong bobbin, I would probably notice when I went to use it again. My next thought was that that sounds like kind of a chore, so now I’m thinking about printing floss labels with the colors. The numbers and symbols would still be black, but there would be two little swatches or lines of the appropriate colors added to the labels. This wouldn’t necessarily let you know which thread on a bobbin was which, if it was ecru and sand for example, but it might keep you from putting blues on a bobbin that was supposed to have pinks.

What do you think?