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So, let’s talk about ribbon.
Up until a few years ago, my gift wrapping skills were DREADFUL. I mean, like a 2nd grader who insists on wrapping their own gift for their best friend, terrible. Every Christmas season, I’d be watching countless YouTube tutorials on how to wrap gifts, and my presents would still end up so ugly.
Well, a few years ago, I finally discovered the best gift wrapping tutorial. I discovered that my problem had been I was using WAY TOO MUCH PAPER when wrapping a gift. I finally learned how to measure just enough, and that really made my gifts already look infinitely better.
Well, then an obsession began. Fun wrapping papers, fancy ribbons, washi tape. I went a little overboard buying ribbon from PaperMart a few years ago, and since then, I haven’t had a good way of storing them. I don’t use them for much else other than gift wrap, so it’s not like I need constant access.
So, I had them stored in a canvas under-bed storage container. And it looked like this:
Not ideal, but not terrible either. But, even though I didn’t need regular access to the ribbon, when I did, it was still a total pain in the butt to drag it out from under the bed.
I had the idea of storing ribbon vertically (certainly not an original idea), but on a somewhat larger scale. And then storing it in the under-utilized space behind our headboard.
And so it began. I bought two dowels from Home Depot (5/8“ and 1/2” and found some extra scrap 2×4″’s we had laying around. I wanted to drill holes in the 2×4 for the dowels.
At first I used a hole saw, but the hole saw created holes that were way too big for the dowels.
Then I tried to find a regular drill bit, but couldn’t find any that were as big as 5/8″. (They might exist, but we just don’t own any). So then I went digging in our tool chest, and found these spade bits. Ken had bought them to install a door sensor one time (that’s a topic for a different post).
There was a 1/2“ spade bit and a 5/8” spade bit, and they both worked perfectly!
Even though it didn’t make sense intuitively (at least not for me), I thought I’d have to use a slightly larger bit to fit the dowels. But as it turns out, the 5/8“ hole from the 5/8” spade bit fit the 5/8“ dowel perfectly, and the 1/2” bit fit the 1/2“ dowel perfectly too! So perfectly, in fact, that I didn’t even need to use any wood glue to make the dowels ”stick.” I pounded them on the top a little with a mallet, and trust me, the dowels are stuck in those holes!
Although it didn’t quite fit ALL my ribbon (I might need to make one more!), it is such a more efficient way of storing them.
And we tucked it behind the headboard:
And now, any time I need to access ribbon, I can just pull out the holder from behind the bed and snip off the ribbon I need.
Oh, and I should point out that I can STILL lift it up by the dowels when it is full of ribbon, and the dowels still don’t come out of the holes.
That’s it! Do you have a ribbon obsession? How do you store your ribbons?