Floss management.  Who doesn't love it?

When I finally took the plunge from kits (where all I had to do was keep the provided floss together and sorted) to patterns (where I had to provide my own), I realized I needed a way to keep my floss sorted, stored, and otherwise corralled for when I'm working on projects.

I looked around for a bit and finally fell in love with Annie's Keepers.  The plastic tabs are sturdy and easily slide into the file storage slide, which hangs in my file cabinet (which is wire-mesh, so the cats can't get in but there's plenty of air circulation so things don't smell musty!).  Because I know me, I've actually got enough for the complete DMC collection (even though I don't quite have all the colors yet) and have a tab labelled for each one.  I've also labelled the top of the slides so I can easily find the color I'm looking for.  I know what I have because I keep a master spreadsheet, where I can enter in what floss colors a project needs and it compares to the collection I have and highlights what's missing.  (Someday I will improve on this to be an even better cross stitch inventory management program, but I'm not there yet.)

When I'm working on a project, I can pop out the tab and add it to my ring, which keeps things together and in easy access.  It's easy to keep things in order too, so I don't have to fuss around with them.

There's a little bit of prep work with this - I precut all my floss into 18" lengths when I buy it (quick and easy way to do that: take a board, hammer in two nails 9" apart, wind the thread around them until the skein is used up, and then cut once).  Once that's done though, my floss is set and ready for stitching!