Ribbon Shelf

How to satisfy a wife and clean the craft room in 13 ½ easy steps – a tutorial on ribbon storage.

Welcome to the May Arts Ribbon Organization blog hop, thanks to the generous nature of May Arts and my lack of organization, I had a bit of problem with my ribbon storage, so this hop gave me a great excuse to convince the fabulous hubby to make me something.  So, without further adieu, here's my guest on the blog today: Dan Thiem.

In order to see the ever-shrinking craft room floor, I was given the task of creating a ribbon storage cabinet for the growing collection of ribbon in my wife’s craft collection.  Aside from the somewhat elusive brief that “more is more, but cheap is good”, my wife gave me free reign to create at will.

Step 1: Dream up ideas to hold ribbon.  I settled on a basic cabinet with a bunch of dowels to hold spools.

Step 2:  Go to the lumber yard and see what they have.  My lumber yard had clear pine, vertical grain doug fir, redwood and oak.  I chose redwood because it’s red, clear, easy to work with and relatively 

inexpensive.  I purchased 16’ of 5/8” x 5 ½”  board that was in stock. 

Step 3: Come home and figure out how to turn the boards into a cabinet.  I built a jig to cut half-dadoes and full dadoes to join the box pieces together.  This took several hours and several more beers to get right.

Step 4: Measure wife and make sure my cabinet (er I mean her cabinet) wouldn’t be too tall.  I settled on 5’ overall height for the cabinet, perfect for her to place her most precious spools at eye-level.

Step 5:  Cut pieces to length:  2 @ 60” and 3 @ 32 and a bit”

Step 6: Cut half dadoes on top and full dadoes on middle and bottom of side rails.

Step 7:  Cut half dadoes on top cross piece.

Step 7 ½: Sand and finish cut pieces with cherry Danish oil. 

Step 8:  Glue and nail all pieces together to form a cabinet.  I used a pneumatic brad nailer because it sounds cool and shoots metal spikes through wood.

Step 9: Square cabinet and attach back.  I didn’t really know what to do about the back, but had an epiphany while shunting the mower from the back of the house to the front.  Several weeks earlier (and by total coincidence), I had purchased a bunch of redwood fence palings…what better use than to form the back of my new cabinet?  My fence still has a gaping hole in it, but the rough sawn palings add some texture to the cabinet.

Step 9: I finished the palings with Danish oil and nailed them to the back of the cabinet, but when I stood the piece up, two things were immediately obvious.  1. The palings were water logged and heavy so my cabinet fell over backwards.  2. My cabinet was red, pretty, back heavy, and completely useless because I didn’t have a way of attaching dowels to hold the ribbon. Eventually I decided to cut ¾” strips of clear redwood (from my scraps) and drill 3/8” holes on the edges; these served as great little brackets for the dowels.  I also added a filler piece below the paling backers that supported the cabinet more securely in the back. 

Step 10: I finished all of the little brackets (18 in all!) with oil and nailed / glued them to the inside of the cabinet allowing enough room on some for monster 6” spools of ribbon.

Step 11: I admired my handiwork now that the cabinet didn’t fall over backwards, however the front still looked naked.  So, I decided to rip down more fence palings and make a face frame for the cabinet that matched the rough sawn look of the backing. (I also finished the face frame in oil).

Step 12: Cut dowels to fit…ok this didn’t work.  The poplar dowels I got at the lumber yard were so flimsy that even a few spools of ribbon quickly sagged in the middle.  Hello aluminum rod; a much better fit and more secure.  These I cut to fit with a hack saw and some elbow grease.

Step 13: (not yet done) find a place other than the kitchen to store the ribbon storage rack. 

To see what the rest of the May Arts Design Team has created, or out sourced, hop along... the ribbon lady is giving away 3 spools of ribbon to one lucky commenter.

Gini, Jen, Jenifer and Karen