My leaning tower of beading wire

I'm having a crummy day today, but I thought I'd show you something other than flowers today as I found a couple of pics of my DIY solution for storing spools of beading wire and other stringing materials such as Fireline (even if I normally don't like it, I can still have it).

I used to keep them in one of these, but I needed the space for other things and it would be too expensive to buy another unit of boxes like the two I already have. So I took some hard and heavy black steel wire from the hardware store, and bent it into some sort of holder that can stand on the table just as well as being hung on the wall (by the loop at the top). I can slide of the spools from the top as well as from the bottom.




At first I made just to be able to hang it on the wall, it was first at a latter point I realised this uneven make-shift holder could also stand on its own -- and be reasonably stable when it did -- if I just made a few small alterations. But that also made me spot a possible problem: when hanging on the wall, the hook acted as a stop, preventing the spools from falling off the top. Well, that and gravity. When standing on a table, it was all too easy for a cat (or human) to knock the whole thing over and the spools would scatter across the floor. So I added a "lock". At first it was a big bead attached to the loop using a safety pin, but then I found a more aesthetically pleasing solution by using a chunky work-hardened anodized aluminium jump ring. The open slot is the right size to be able to push it over the steel wire without it falling of by itself.

So there you have it, a far from perfectly shaped but pretty simple and useful beading wire spool holder that takes up almost no place at all and can be put on the table just as well as it can be hung on a wall, which ever suits the best when workning.


Tip: I've got many ways to sort my supplies. Above, I've put the mini spools on top and then sorted by colour, but even more importantly, I've put the wires I use the most either close to the top or bottom so I can easily get to them without having to slide off a lot of other spools to get to the spool I want. That's why you find the Fireline and .010 wire in the middle.