How to Store Fly Tying Yarn
Once you start amassing a collection of fly tying yarn, you might start wondering about the best way to store and organize the stuff. There is no right or wrong way, but here are a few options you might want to think about.
The Old Drawer or Bag Trick
All of our yarns come tucked inside little Ziploc-style bags. This means that you can toss them all into a drawer, box, or larger Ziploc bag for storage purposes. If you store all of your fly tying materials in a set of plastic drawers, for example, just place your yarns inside of a quart- or gallon-sized Ziploc bag and stick it in the drawer. Nice and easy.
Pegboard
The little bags that our yarns come in have a 1/4" hang hole above the zipper part. This is so that the bag can be hung from pegboard hooks. It just so happens that many fly tiers like to hang their materials from pegboard. Here are a couple of blog posts that show pegboard at fly tying stations:
- John's Fly Fishing Fly-Tying Room Tour (From Dream Green DIY)
- Fly Tying Peg Board Project (From Arizona Wanderings)
So if you have pegboard on the walls above your fly tying desk, you can absolutely hang our little yarn bags from the hooks. But what if you don't have any wall space to hang pegboard from? Well, why not consider a freestanding desktop pegboard display? Maybe something like one of these from Amazon:
(These photos are from this Amazon listing, this Amazon listing, and this Amazon listing, respectively.)
Craft Boxes
This is our favorite method of yarn storage. The piece of cardboard that the FlyTyingYarn.com yarns are wrapped around is called a bobbin. They're made for storing embroidery thread (called floss). A Google image search for "embroidery floss organizer" or "floss bobbin storage"will bring up all sorts of clear plastic boxes with dividers in them that are made exactly to store these cardboard bobbins, whether they be full of embroidery floss or fly tying yarn.
Here's my yarn-filled floss organizer. It was $3 from the local Walmart:
Works great!
Here's the Walmart.com link for that exact box, and here's a comparable one on Amazon (17 compartments instead of 18). And here's a smaller one on Amazon if your yarn buying habit hasn't yet gotten out of control (shame on you). Any major craft store in the US (Michael's, Hobby Lobby, JoAnn, etc.) should also sell this kind of thing.
If you use one of these craft boxes to store your yarns, just use a pen to write the name/color of the yarn onto the cardboard bobbin. If you want to keep the yarns inside of the little plastic baggies that we sell them in, you can simply stick those inside the containers, too. The plastic bags will get a bit scrunched, but it won't hurt anything.
Yarn Bag Dimensions
If you are interested in finding your own storage solution for your yarns, here are the dimensions for the package:
So that's a bit over 2.5 inches high (left photo), 2 inches wide (middle photo), and half of an inch thick (right photo). Note that we use a couple of different kinds of plastic bags, so the sizes and dimensions of the bags may vary slightly.
Let us know what you come up with and we'll share it here!