Craft Room Project: Under-Shelf Ribbon Spool Holder

Or alternate title: Hooray, I have something to share that doesn't have to do with our bathroom renovation! :)

We're in a bit of a holding pattern this week with the bathroom, because Lowes was out of stock of the best brand of thinset, so we're waiting until it's restocked, because ordering it online and having it shipped from somewhere else would have been crazy expensive. Makes me glad we have two other full bathrooms, so we can take as long as we need with this renovation. Also makes me glad that I actually got to work on something else, another little way to organize my craft room/home office space!

At the beginning of the month I had a chance to do some major organizing in here, defining spaces on my long L-shaped desk, hanging curtains and installing shelves to hold baskets of my craft supplies, all organized by type.

But it wasn't until this week that I had a chance to make the ribbon spool holder that I'd been wanting. And now I have a place to easily store and dispense my hoarders amount perfectly-normal-for-a-crafter amount of ribbon. (Hey, a lot of the purple and chocolate are leftovers from our pocketfold, laser cut wedding invitations, since they had ribbon belly bands!)

Anyway, I wanted to share how I made this under-shelf version of a ribbon spool holder, since I've seen several different takes on this online. Some just hang a wooden dowel from hooks, others I've seen route out U-shapes to slide the ends of a dowel down in, and I've also seen a dowel incorporated into the sides of a standing bookshelf.

But for my version, I decided to go with a clean, simple, drilled holes and capped dowel. First, I picked up some wooden shelf brackets from the hardware store, and a wood dowel. I brought a spool of ribbon with me, and determined that 1/2" was the best dowel diameter, so I drilled 5/8" holes in my brackets, so they would only be a little bit larger than the dowel. (Tip: I wanted to sand the drilled holes a little, so I improvised and wrapped a small strip of sandpaper around a Sharpie marker, and it worked great to slide the sandpaper through the hole to smooth it out.)

Then I painted everything with the Ikea-matching Parchment White by Glidden. The small test pot of paint was more than I even needed.

By the way, I didn't paint the tips, because I wanted to make sure my caps would still slide on and off. And I stuck little sewing pins in the ends of the dowels, and then the other end of the pins into little tea lights I had laying around, to hold the dowel up while it dried.

Then came the caps. I went into this project knowing I wanted to do a removable cap of some kind on either end of my dowel, since I didn't feel like routing out slots to hang the dowel in. So I just kind of wandered around the hardware store until I found something that would work. What I ended up was these little caps, perfect to slide on the ends of my 1/2" dowel. They were near the doorstops and furniture leg caps. To dress them up (and to widen them slightly, so they would stay in my drilled holes in the brackets better), I glued little green buttons on them.

Not only do the buttons work perfectly for craft room decor, but they're green to match my color scheme as well!

Then all that was really left was to screw the brackets to the wall, under my craft supply shelves, slide the dowel through the drilled holes, and put the caps on.

A close up of the dowel button caps holding the dowel in place.

Ok, there was still one more thing left to do, fill the dowel with ribbon!

Mmmm, ribbon. Makes me so happy for some reason.

The dowel does sag a bit in the middle now, with the weight of the ribbon on it. I'm considering maybe adding a cup hook in the middle, to help support the weight, since I think adding a third bracket in the middle would make it too hard to take the dowel in and out to add or remove the spools.

But overall, I'm pretty happy with how it looks for now! Hooray for even more organization in here (and for getting to work on something other than our bathroom for a day!).

Do you have a fun way to organize/dispense your ribbon? Anyone else still holding on to ribbon left over from their wedding crafting? :)