I purchased some basic wooden spools on a recent trip to Michael’s, because I love miniature crafts and I particularly love all of the spool crafts I’ve been seeing everywhere. I’ve captured some of my favorites on my Pinterest board simply titled Spool Craft Ideas.

Although I wasn’t sure what I would create with these spools, I knew I wanted to make a Springtime craft. I wanted my craft to be something I could display in our home throughout the Spring season, rather than a holiday-specific decoration. And I knew I wanted something for our mantel, which has a TV hanging above it (please don’t judge me), meaning whatever I came up with needed to be small. Our color palette in our living room is browns and taupes with mixes of teals and pale ice aquas as our accent colors. So I began by painting the spools brown.

In the photo above, the brown paint is sitting inside of a lid I recycled from an empty peanut butter jar. These lids make fantastic paint holders.

I applied two coats of brown craft paint onto the spools. Since I was going to be covering most of the spools with ribbon and twine, I wasn’t too concerned with any parts that weren’t fully covered by the paint. Let the paint dry.

The plastic jar below says Cucumber Salad but obviously it’s holding my twine and string collection instead. The label always reminds me how delicious that salad is!

When we had our Oktoberfest Party last Fall, I tied up the outdoor decorations onto our pergola using twine. When it came time to take those decorations down, I kept every single piece of twine, even though it meant lots of pieces with knots in them. I just stuffed them into this jar, confident that I’d be using them at some point in my crafting. See honey? I’m not simply a hoarder. I’m a craft supply hoarder!

I used the knots to my advantage. I decided to cut off most of the knotted strings, just leaving two small pieces which resembled a shabby bow, and then wrapped the twine around the spool using a strong glue to hold the twine in place.

~Laura