Ribbon Storage Box Tutorial

Look at this brilliant idea for a ribbon storage from jmday:

Ever since I made the first ribbon storage box to mimic this box from Oriental Trading, I’ve been thinking about how hard I looked for a good tutorial on the subject. I can’t promise that my tutorial will be “good”, but I’ll show you what I did.

The first big problem is to find a good sturdy box that will accomodate a good number of ribbon spools I ended

up buying two of these (plus a smaller version of the same box) from IKEA. The great thing about them is that they are sold in packages of two, and they require assembly. Yep, you heard me right, I *LIKE* - in this case - that they weren’t complete on shipment. Here’s why:

Because they are shipped flat, it’s much easier to mark the holes and insert the eyelets. But don’t let that discourage you. Any sturdy cardboard box would work.

The first step is, then to mark where you want the holes. I found that because I could put two rows of ribbon in the box, that I wanted lots of holes to poke it through. So I created this layout. 5 large eyelets on the bottom row, and 8 smaller ones on the top. I just drew two horizontal lines where I wanted each row to be and then evenly spaced each hole. (On this go round, I just opened the box I had completed already and traced the holes locations.)

During my first attempt, I cut each hole by hand with an Exacto knife. That proved to be really hard as this is some seriously thick cardboard. So this time around, I asked my hubster to try using the drill. Ahhh… I saved the aching in my hands and ended up with much cleaner holes! Each hole he drilled was just a tiny bit bigger than the opening in the eyelet.

Next, just insert the eyelets. The large and small follow a similar process, but follow the instructions on your eyelet kits.

And voila! Your own neat ribbon storage! You can see that even with the extra holes I still needed to thread 2 ribbons through some. So far, that seems to be working ok. And it’s really easy to see what I have, and actually USE it because it’s easy to get to.

Now, does anyone know what to do with the little “bobbins of ribbon”? I have a million of those too!!!