Craft Storage Makeover – Our Wonderful Wall of Wool!

Us crafters aren’t exactly known for our minimalist living. I’m always saving and rescuing scraps of fabric, beautiful buttons or zips because I just know that they’ll come in handy… some day 🙂 Plus, it helps that you can use just about any old scrap of fabric to rag rug with!

With your average crafter, this squirrelling away probably wouldn’t be a problem, but as a craft business owner not only do I have to deal with my own personal craft stash (which is task enough as a self-confessed fabric hoarder), but I also have to store all my Ragged Life stock. And it certainly adds up!

Storing Ragged Life tools:

Rag rugging isn’t exactly the most space-efficient of crafts, so I’ve learned to squeeze stock into all sorts of spaces with Tetris-like efficiency. And as my business has grown, I’ve had to change up my craft storage to stop it all descending into chaos. So, it’s not the prettiest of stock rooms, but here’s an inside look into how I store some of my Ragged Life tools and hessian…

Not so glamorous, but here’s an inside peek into my Ragged Life store room…

Hopefully you can now picture me rooting around in there whenever you order a piece of hessian 🙂 And this is how I store some of my larger pieces of fabric…

Craft storage - fabric in wooden crates organised by colour

It’s not quite “Pinterest Perfect”, but it does the job at the moment and it’s ever-evolving.

My Craft Storage Challenge:

Although, I was quite happy with my Ragged Life craft storage, my ultimate organisational challenge came in the form of the 100% wool blanket yarn I started selling in April 2018. For anyone who doesn’t know what blanket yarn is, it’s essentially superb quality, woollen fabric strips, which you can rag rug with. Here are a couple of photos…

Ragged Life 100% Wool Blanket yarn offcuts from British mills perfect strips for rag rug making
Soooo many pretty colours…
And it’s sustainable too!

But, I’m sorry to say that I got myself into a bit of a pickle… To have a good enough range of different colours takes a lot of space and, although the blanket yarn was manageable when I just had a few bags to store, now I have a massive range, which has formed a small blanket yarn mountain…

Big pile of craft fabric in plastic bags ready to be organised

Haha, I feel like I’ve just aired my dirty laundry! And, although it’s fairly comfy to lounge on, the mountain wasn’t exactly sustainable. Finding particular blanket yarns in the pile required wading and sometimes diving, which although cosy, wasn’t exactly efficient. So, a couple of months ago, we decided to re-haul our craft storage of the blanket yarn to make it easier to navigate and a bit more aesthetic. Here’s how we went about it…

The Craft Storage Plan:

My first step was to head to Google to see how other people were storing similar items. Wool immediately sprang to mind. When you Google “wool storage” there are plenty of ingenious storage solutions that come up, but I was particularly enamoured with diamond box shelving (don’t think that’s it’s official name), which looked like it would hold the balls of blanket yarn securely, whilst also looking pretty. This was the original inspiration for my storage…

Oooh, pretty!

But, I would need the cubbies to be a little bigger, as the balls of blanket yarn are a bit bigger than regular skeins of wool. I also fancied white units to make the colours pop better.

The Shelving:

So, with a plan in mind, I decided to have a look online and see whether any retailers sold this style of shelving. Well it turns out that it’s impossible to find anywhere online and I didn’t come across anything similar in person either. Doh! But, I wasn’t deterred. It was time to go bespoke! Fortunately, Sany (one of our Ragged Life family) has a very talented partner who was up for the woodworking challenge. These were a couple of work in progress photos as he made the shelves…

And here was how we precariously transported them from Sany and Sean’s house once they were done!

The Craft Storage Makeover:

So, now is time for the big reveal. This is what the finished shelves look like with all the beautiful blanket yarn stacked onto them. We’ve transformed the former dumping ground into a little crafty chill out zone, complete with statement sofa.

Elspeth Jackson from Ragged Life making a rag rug on a sofa
Elspeth Jackson from Ragged Life rag rugging on a sofa with rainbow blanket yarn

I’m in rainbow heaven!!! 😍

The shelves didn’t quite fit all our blanket yarn (which goes to show just how much we have!), so we’ve actually ordered another couple of shelves off Sean 😋 Watch this space to see what we do when the others are made.

Behind the Scenes:

And here are a few behind the scenes photos as we stacked the shelves.

So, what do you think of our wonderful wall of wool? Comment below to let me know whether you think it was all worth the agro 😊 Also, we now feel less embarrassed about people popping in to choose blanket yarns, so message us if you’d like to come and visit the wonderful wall of wool in person to buy some blanket yarn.

Or, if you want to be the first to see what’s new in the Ragged Life world (we’re always up to strange antics) then why not join our fortnightly Rag Rug Inspiration Newsletter here.

OR CONNECT WITH US ON SOCIAL MEDIA AT:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raggedlife/

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/raggedlife

As always, happy rag rugging!

Elspeth x

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[…] Psst… with all this talk about blanket yarn you may be left thinking, how an earth do you keep it all organised? For a sneak peak behind the scenes of our Ragged Life headquarters. Check out our blog post from last year detailing our craft storage makeover here. […]

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[…] the Ragged Life HQ and you can get a sneak peak of how we store them in our craft storage blog post here. Or, if you’d like to purchase any of our gorgeous shades of blanket yarn head over to our […]

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[…] 2019 was also the year that we decided to tackle the blanket yarn mountain. We turned our disaster zone into a colour-coordinated craft mecca with custom shelves for our 100% Wool Blanket Yarn. I dare anyone to look at the photos below and not find them immensely satisfying… See the full transformation here. […]

Sue Thomas
Sue Thomas
5 years ago

Looks wonderful. I’m Wanting a pale blue grey and a pale olive. Do you have either? Sue

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