DMC Thread Box Solution for those of us who use Bobbins!

I've had my gorgeous wooden DMC thread box for a while now. As an item I love it and would never part with it but in practice I find it a real pain to use. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the box it is made of wood and features five drawers and a lift-up lid that reveals compartments of different sizes. Each drawer comes with vertical dividers that can be slotted into place. Each compartment is then the right size to hold skeins. All good - except that I don't keep my thread in skeins. 

I wind my thread onto cardboard bobbins and the width of each compartment is too narrow to hold two rows of bobbins but too large to hold just one. I started to put duplicates at the side but the bobbins had a tendency to move around. This is a real pain as I store them in numerical order. It also wasted huge amounts of precious space. What to do?

I thought about reverting to my original plastic boxes or the wooden boxes that I started to use in 2014 (see early posts) but it seemed such a shame not to use the DMC box for DMC threads. 

I decided to try my hand at simple cartonnage. 

After a few false starts I designed and made a simple tray from white cardboard. I made it a few millimetres shorter than the width of the drawer and just a few millimetres wider than each bobbin. Just enough to make it easy to get the bobbins in and out but tight enough to stop the bobbins from moving around. 

I found that I could now fit 9 trays in each drawer and 20+ bobbins in each tray. Suddenly, I had enough room to store my duplicate threads and some tools in the box too... 

I'll share my step-by-step guide to making this inexpensive storage solution next time.