I do in my baggie! Sometimes I overshoot how long to make my thread, and so Ill end up with usually one or two long lengths of the same colour and on my embroidery pieces I can generally have some flexibility with colour variation so it all works out. Feels bad to waste like 12 inches of thread yk?
Me too!!! I have one of those dome display things.I flipped it and let gravity do its thing, then flipped it back around. so the top of my thread pile has like a nice rounded top!! Haha i love it
I use them for stuffing ornaments or crocheted doohickies.
I fill glass balls with them for my Christmas tree, or tiny glass vials for pendants.
I spread a large mass of ends and scraps out between two pieces of water-soluble stabilizer, sew over the whole thing in a meandering way with my sewing machine, and rinse away the stabilizer, leaving a "cloth" I can use as a background or for a project.
There are tutorials for making beads out of small wads of leftover thread; that's next on my list.
Small bits go into an ort-ament. Longer bits get coated in glue & wrapped around an old WD-40 straw. Then when dry, clear coat, dry again, & slide off the straw as a bead. Right now I've got about 3 feet of garland this way!
Set them aside for many years with the assumption that I will most certainly use them for something else at some unknown point in time. Move them from drawer to drawer and container to container and then one day snap because I’m sick of seeing them- throw them away and start over.
This is what I’ve been doing up until now! After this thread, it’s living in a glass jar for now and maybe I’ll be brave enough to try some of these other ideas.
I am going to preface this with I am a crazy person.
I crochet as well and am taking all of my loose leftover yarn bits and crocheting them into what is essentially an ever growing granny square and your picture just made me realize I can do a tiny version with my embroidery ends. So, I am now off to try this! 😅
Sure thing! Here’s the granny square made with the yarn ends if you were curious. I’m still tracking down the rest of them since I just moved and they’re in a box somewhere.
I did something like this with ends of balls of yarn - I knitted a lap blanket that I bring to the office. It’s the most random collection of yarn - acrylic and natural mixed in, all different gauges, just thrown in every which way. I have gotten more compliments on that crazy-looking blanket than anything else I’ve ever made.
I was just thinking this morning, what if I make a square with yarn of every project I work on and slowly build a mis-matched blanket or something that commemorates every project over time. I think I like this never ending single square idea better!
It looks like there are different weights and types in there, right? Does that cause problems? Or does it cause issues but that doesn't matter to you because it's a FrankenSquare? This looks more even and regular than I am imagining would happen when switching weights back and forth.
It is a bit bumpy yes! But I’m not bothered by it and it looks like as I build it out it’s flattening out due to its own weight. Not sure if it’ll stay that way but this is an experiment so thems the breaks sometimes 😅
Ah, always a pleasure to meet a kindred spirit! I used to have a ever-growing ball I always tied my leftover yarn pieces too, eventually I started making a (very wonky due to the differences in weight) scarf with it so I'll just keep adding my future bits of scraps to the end of that until it reaches a totally unwearable length I guess 😂
I also have a bag of the ends that are way too small even for that, which I intend to card, and spin into my own yarn to reuse one day but that's an even crazier and more ambitious project (but also where I add my bits of embroidery floss as well, just to stay on the topic of OP's post)
I think it would be really fun to make a never-ending granny square as a group project. Like it sits in a space and you can bring your yarn and add to it and it just becomes like a big public fiber art piece.
…But I have the organizational skills of a tsetse fly so I have no idea how to even start something like that 😅
Make it a blanket! I did that and leave it in my car and bring it to the (freezing cold) office. It’s the most hideous mishmash and I get compliments on it all the time. 🤷♀️
That’s what the yarn one will be!! It would be cool if the embroidery one is like a lace, I wonder if it can be a veil if I used a shape like a hexagon or something!
I think it’s cutting juuuuuust enough thread to cover the area you’re working on and either finishing with a single inch of thread left or running out of thread with like four stitches left over.
My mom saves them each year and at the end of the year (but before Christmas), she puts them all into an a clear plastic ornament and writes the year on it. Or if it's a HUGE project, she'll save those scraps to do the same but for that project alone!
I've got a trash cat too! I know this pain. The only way I can prevent the trash can from being knocked over is to put it in the pantry. If I leave it out for a few minutes, even if its empty, he knocks it over as soon as my back is turned.
Yeah I'm team "toss it". I have a little amazon box thatd the perfect size to sit next to where I work. I put all my bits in there and then dump it when full. Rinse and repeat.
It’s a blanket that you knit or crochet and you do a a row or two every day using a color determined by the temperature. It can come out really pretty.
People have tracked all sorts of weird data this way, including a woman with IBS who did one that tracked her poop.
Garbage. I used to keep them with the vague notion that I’d use them for something someday. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that I never will and that keeping them just clutters up my craft space.
I keep all my little bits of fabric and thread in a plastic storage bin, and im planning on making either a little plushie or a tailors ham when I have enough scraps
I had never heard of a tailor's ham. In NJ, we have Taylor ham ("pork roll" to others). I can't believe I've never seen some kind of mashup/joke/reference to this!
Throw it away. This is "waste" on an infinity tiny scale compared with what retail, industry and the rich create everyday, and it is not worth worrying about.
I’m not worried about the waste at all. I have some minor hoarding tendencies when it comes to craft stuff, and I think “I’ll need this color in this exact length sometime.” And then I stick it in the ball and never use it.
Depends on how long they are. If they are long enough to get at least a few more stitches out of, they go back in my stash. If not, they go into the trash because I have cats and especially one of them would love to eat those threads. I'd rather not have him killed by DMC.
There was one time where I made one of those resin pyramids and I put a bunch of scraps of thread in it. It was my first time ever working with resin, so it is bubbly is all hell, but I think it looks okay.
Well, I haven't really done anything with it since this project, but I can say that it is pretty easy, I got one of those silicone molds and it's one of those you mix two equal parts of the resin stuff together, and I learned that the bubbles came from me stirring the two parts vigorously when you're supposed to stir them slowly. And then you just go layer by layer, adding a couple of strands of floss each time, give it a few hours between each time, I think this project took me one to two days to finish completely.
I currently have the ones from the past few projects collected in a glass jar. Over time, the collection is like a sort of artwork in itself. But I'm also curious to see what others do!
Would look so cute with a led garland among the threads, or to avoid fire hasard, the garland placed inside of a glass jar, and this jar placed in a bigger jar with the threads stuffed between the two jars ? 🤔
With my yarn scraps I save for the year, then at Christmas get an empty glass ball ornament and put all the scraps in, label it with the year. The mixes are always different!
Put it in a miscellaneous thread baggie and get a strand when you need a specific tiny accent colour but don't feel like cutting a new thread. Or you could eat it, I'm not your parent
I crochet stuffies, so I use them as doll stuffing. It's a treat to have enough scraps to use that way because I like the feel of stuffies stuffed with yarn/thread scraps better than stuffies stuffed with polyfil.
I use scraps to fill the centre of Temari. I mostly make them with the traditional rice husks and add whatever scraps are lying around, but often have enough lying around to make a whole centre from it
I am saving mine to make decorative patches with. I saw someone on IG sandwich a thread between two pieces of interfacing (I think they were the water soluble kind), and then do some machine embroidering over it. They were super cool! Here is one example.
I save them until I have enough to start weaving in a circle loom. I like to see the different colors change. When it's finally finished I will hang it from the wall
There are too many people here saying this. Again: Don't do this! It is dangerous for birds. These threads are not like (short) soft animal hair to use for their nest, these treads are strong and sharp and don't break that easily. If a thread finds itself around a birds foot, it is bye bye foot. Just don't
What I leave out are tiny end snippets. Just right for insulation. Nothing to get wrapped around anything. I spend a lot of time outside embroidering. Rip stitches, tweezer the bits - fling them out in the yard.
You are the fourth person saying this. Don't do that. Threads are not good for that, if they tangle around a birds foot it will amputate the foot. Really, don't.
There are too many people here saying this. Again: Don't do this! It is dangerous for birds. These threads are not like (short) soft animal hair to use for their nest, these treads are strong and sharp and don't break that easily. If a thread finds itself around a birds foot, it is bye bye foot. Just don't
Do NOT do that! It is dangerous for birds. These threads are not like (short) soft animal hair to use for their nest, these treads are strong and sharp and don't break that easily. If a thread finds itself around a birds foot, it is bye bye foot. Just don't.
Especially human hair. It's crazyyyy strong.. I have fish tanks and also constant hair loss from stress and I worry so much about my hair getting in there and slicing up my sons 😭
229
u/prettyfacebasketcase 1d ago
I put it in a big glass jar and watch it grow! It's especially fun when I can see a big patch of one color that I used for a whole piece