Welcome to another week of organising your sewing supplies!  After a challenge from Debbie last week I tackled my zips this week.

My zips had, until last week, been languishing in a very crowded small tray in my Trofast unit, and although they were bundled together by size, it was still very hard to see what I had, especially as I added more over the 5 or 6 years that I’ve been collecting them (I tend to buy in bulk too, adding to the challenge).  I knew I had to do something about it, but hadn’t come up with something until Debbie came along to poke me into action!  I have a small sewing space with not a lot of floor or wall real estate, in fact unless I take down the minis I’ve received in swaps, I’ve got no wall space at all.  That left me with the 2 doors into my area, one of which already has a noticeboard and mini quilt reminder to turn my iron off, and the other of which housed a mini on its own.  The only other option was the side of my cube storage for my fabric, but they’re relatively narrow, so anything for there would have to be custom cut to size.

My first thought for a hanging solution was pegboard, but it’s actually surprisingly hard to come by in the UK in wood (the metal options at B&Q being too big), so since I didn’t want to pay £100 delivery from the nearest place I could find online down near Manchester, I turned to Ikea to see what they had.  I initially looked in the notice board area, but then, when following a photo that lead to a page that contained nothing like what was in the photo (incredibly frustrating!), I happened upon the Enudden hooks and knobs.  A lightbulb went on in my head and that mini on the back of the door to the hallway was relegated to the top of the wall above the swaps (good job I have very high ceilings!).

Now I hope you’re sitting comfortably when I tell you the price… The over the door hooks are £1.95 each (2 will fit comfortably side by side on a normal sized internal door).

The towel hooks (on the second row) are £2.90 each:

And the larger knobs that I used at the bottom and to the left on the middle row are £1.50/2 pack:

I also utilised a hook to the side of the door that’s been there since before I moved in and I’ve never removed,

To hang the zips I used a pile of coathanger hooks with clamps that I had bought for another project a couple of years ago that didn’t quite work out as planned, but as I didn’t have quite enough of them I picked up the ones from the top row in Ikea as well, also Enudden, at £2/2 pack.  The Ikea ones swivel whereas the original ones don’t, but that doesn’t really matter since they’re all visible now really.

For the layout I worked out what sort of length of zip I’ve have on each level and then left a small gap between the longest and the top of the next row of hooks.  The top row goes up to 8″ on the over the door hooks, the middle row on the towel hooks to 16″ (running right to left so the 16″ ones didn’t interfere with the door handle) and the bottom row on the individual knobs to 26″.  Since I had some that were even longer than 26″ and didn’t really want them touching the ground, I added the knob for the 30″ ones to the left of the towel hooks on the middle row, and used that hook I already had there for the rest of the long ones.

Finally I got out my Dymo and happily labelled the lengths onto all the hooks so I could see at a glance what I had without having to grab a measuring tape each time as I used to with the tray option previously.

All in all I’m happy with the solution – it was a pretty cheap option, required not a lot of effort to put up, and was easy to do by myself.  If you don’t have an Ikea handy, I’m sure your local DIY shop will have similar options available, you just need to negotiate the door real estate if you’re sharing your sewing space!