The Little Things

You may find dust in my house, but you will not find the things I love thrown about willy nilly.  I do not love to clean house.  Now once I get started, I love the smell of lemon, pine and almond.  (The key is once I get started.)  What I will do, with my OCD self, is organize and catalog the hell out of stuff.  You should know by because of my swatch cards.  I have spreadsheets that track the contents of my sewing magazines, completed projects and WIP.  My SWAPs are PDF documents; you get the picture.
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What I had been struggling with was a way to organize the small stuff you use frequently in your sewing room.  I looked at sewing baskets and I wasn't happy with what I saw.  I'm so glad I found this tote; it's almost perfect. Because of it's height, it can sit right behind my sewing machine and still be easily accessible.

What I like most, aside from the obvious portability, is the size. The three trays allow for organizing a lot of things. Mine hold sewing machine presser feet, buttons organized by color and fasteners. (My gripe is that although you can divide the trays into 36 compartments each, they don't give you enough dividers to do so.)

The slots on the side hold all of the tools I need easy access to -- five scissors, a seam ripper, thread nippers and sewing gauge. The handles of the scissors tend to turn in ways that keep the lid from closing easily. It takes a little adjusting, but it does close. Because of this, I keep it open during my sewing weekends. I close it during the week.

 

I thought the top compartment could have been organized a bit better, but I'm making do. I added the Sew-Lutions Bobbin & Supply Box. It fits nicely and rounds out the tote's functionality. It sits on top of randomly thrown in pin boxes, a rotary cutter and other misc. items. I'm glad I bought the Bobbin and Supply Box because it gave me the extra dividers I needed for the tote's three trays.

The box is constructed of durable hard plastic. What surprised me was the cheap, flimsy plastic used to for the bobbin tray. It's the same type of plastic used in packaging curling irons and some toys -- the stuff that's hard to cut open and usually scratches you at least twice.

The bobbin tray is poorly designed. The wells that hold the bobbins aren't deep enough. You can easily tip all of the bobbins over. Although the bobbin try sits flush on its own, when you put it in the box, it only sits evenly when the pin strip is toward the back of the box. The tray tilts when you put the pin strip toward the front. This means that you have to reach over bobbins to use the pin strip. Not a good proposition when it's so easy to knock the bobbins over. 

I'm glad I purchased this bobbin box because I needed it to increase the functionality of the tote. Together, it's a great combo. If I didn't have the tote, I would have purchased the plain bobbin box and some type of cup to hold things like marking pens and tracing wheels.