Handy DANdy Improvised Painting Rack

So my wife does a lot of sewing, and she gets through a lot of threads. For years she’s been chucking away the empty thread spools, I mean, why wouldn’t you?
However after seeing me scavenging for all kinds of household waste (mostly my obsession with keeping all the milk bottle lids) one day hovering over the bin with a handful of spent spools she asked “Can you use these for anything?”

”Hmm” I thought. They must be useful for something. I was thinking about what terrain they could be used for. Pillars? Those big things that cables come on? Then I thought they are a similar shape to painting handles… So I tried one as a painting handle. Pretty good in the hand but the thin ones fall over pretty easily when you set them down. We can’t have that. Hmm what if I could make some kind of tray with pegs to set them on? Dunce Mode engaged! Took a while for the penny to drop that there must be a proper holder that sewers (sewists?) use to organise their threads.

One heavy face-palm later and google revealed DOZENS of them.

I bought this one

Stick the models on with blue tac. The spools are comfortable to hold.

Now I’m very lucky in that I have easy access to spools (I’m not far off having enough for a full rack of 60). The whole thing just cost me the £12 rack cost. You’ll be best placed if you can find someone who’s throwing these away and get them for free. You can buy empty wooden spools on eBay so for a little extra cost you could buy some and would probably have more comfortable ‘painting handles’. Either way if a gaming company starts selling these it’ll be many times the cost of nicking sewing products!