My new Ribbon Storage System

I used to have my ribbons in four different places - I had rolls of plain ribbon in a plastic ribbon storage box, short bits of ribbon wound around themselves in a plastic embellishment box, and odds and ends in shoeboxes mixed in with my fibers and lace etc. It was hard to know where to look to find anything and the mini-rolls kept getting lost in the clutter...
I was thinking of getting a wire mesh basket to put my ribbons in and threading them through the sides so I could pull bits out as needed, and I've looked in Ross a few times to try to get my hands on a suitable container, but I saw a better idea on the Crafty Storage Blog - a few days ago they featured someone who put all their spools of ribbon into a woven basket and threaded them through the back... that sounded perfect to me - baskets are MUCH cheaper than those expensive plastic boxes or metal tins, and you could fit a heck of a lot of ribbon into the right-sized basket.

Yesterday I went to Ross and I found the perfect Ribbon Basket - it's woven from seagrass so it's very flexible and easy to poke the ribbons through wherever I want them, and the spaces between the spokes are large enough for a ribbon up to an inch wide. The only thing it doesn't have is a top to keep the dust (and cats) out, but a piece of cardboard will fix that.

I put the larger ribbons towards the bottom so they wouldn't cover up the narrow ones, and arranged them in a kind of rainbow all around the basket. The only ribbons that I did NOT put into the basket are my very narrowest spools of plain ribbon - since I already have an expensive ribbon box for them, I left them alone.The basket is up on top of my paper storage drawers (out of cat-reach) and sitting on a lazy susan so I can swing it around and access all four sides easily.

Total Cost -
Seagrass basket from Ross - $6.99
Lazy Susan from Ikea - $7.99 (I think, I bought it some time ago)
Time taken to sort and thread all my ribbons - a couple of hours
Having my ribbons stored where I can actually see them all at the same time - priceless

365 Cards Day 26

(I had to take a few days off crafting to rest my hands... I'll try to get back to Days 24/25 when I can.)

Today's challenge is to use a 'recipe' to make your card. You have to use the following elements AND NO EXTRAS:

•  5x5 card
• 3 circles
• 2 squares
• ribbon
• sentiment of your choice

I never make square cards because they need special envelopes and take up too much room in the OWH mailing boxes, so this is a first. A friend lost her husband to brain cancer last weekend, so I decided to make her the card nobody ever wants to have to make... my challenge was to follow the recipe and to make a card as beautiful as I could in tribute to Rob.
The recipe said you had to use ribbon but it didn't say what you had to do with it, so I tried my hand at ribbon embroidery. I've never done this before but I found a tutorial on basic ribbon embroidery stitches which makes it all very simple, and it really wasn't as hard as it looks. I used the narrowest ribbon for the flowers and a wider one for the leaves because I didn't have the right colour green in the skinny one. The wider ribbon looks good but it was MUCH harder to get it through the cardstock. If you want to try this, use a tiny hole punch to make the holes in the center of the flowers (I used my cropodile) and make sure you're using sturdy cardstock because it's going to get pretty beat-up before you're finished.