A few weeks back my mom’s friend cleared out her sewing room, and I was the happy recipient of quite a few spools of thread. Tonnes of spools. I needed somewhere to store them all in a hurry so I built these Spool Shelves with bobbin storage. It’s a little rough as I went from sketch to having it up on the wall in about an hour and a half, but it’s really just a proof of concept to see if this is the right thread storage solution for me.
The concept here is pretty simple: Make some shallow shelves with regularly spaced nails for storing the matching bobbins. I made these Spool Shelves out of some unfinished pine scraps, and routed dadoes for the shelves. I used my router, with a straightedged guide clamped to the stock. You can see I routed a slot for the bottom shelf as well – that was a silly mistake, or maybe I just mounted it upside down to my original intentions – I can’t remember, and both are exactly the type of mistake I make all the time. A little woodglue (titebond 2 in this case, but any yellow glue will work) in the dadoes and a couple of small nails hold everything in place. Clamp it all up while the glue sets – the glue sets better under pressure. Then I mounted it to the tall with a few furniture braces – the pine is light, and the thread weighs next to nothing, so there’s not much concern about the load.
Notes for Next Time:
- Finish the spool shelves – Plane, sand, and at least one thin coat of poly
- Find a way to set the nails more consistently
- Match the shelves to the sides, and don’t extra slots
- Rout the slots on a slight angle to raise the front of the shelves and keep the spools from falling off so often
- Use thinner shelves – thread weighs nothing