Sunday, June 10, 2012

BOBBIN-BUDDIES. . . Easy and Quick To Make

Bobbin-Buddies are quick and easy to make. They can be fairly pricey to buy in the notions department, but inexpensive to make.


Here's what ya need and all easy to find at the hardware store or a big-box store like Home Depot, Lowe's, etc:

* 3/4inch by 1/2 inch clear plastic tubing [this is the outside/inside measurements of tubing]. Find this tubing in the plumbing department. You might also find some where aquarium supplies are sold,
* Xacto knife or something to cut rings/slices with.


Using an Xacto knife cut off 1/4 inch "rings" from the tubing. Cut through one side of the ring so a bobbin can be inserted. That's it! These are so handy. Below is a closeup of the kind/size of plastic tubing I bought:



I used Resolve to remove the black manufacturing marks from the tubing, or you could just cut around it... but I was being "thrifty". *g*



The Xacto knife was a bit difficult for me to handle so I tried a carpet knife [orange in upper left corner of picture] and finally a pair of scissors. Bigger scissors would have been better. I took about ten feet of tubing to my Tuesday Friendship Group meeting and we all made some. Great fun!

Hope you are having a lovely weekend and have some time to stitch. I just made a pincushion this afternoon [which I will share next time]. Right now it's off to the grocery store and then back to cleaning and organzing the sewing room. It will get finished one of these days!

Until then. . . Quilty Hugs,

PS: I did NOT invent this idea. There are several versions of this around the Net. This is just the way I make mine.

7 comments:

Terry@ a quilting blog said...

Great tip Cyn and can't wait to see your pincushion!

Rosa Robichaud said...

Tks for the tutorial, Cyn!!!

Rosa

Pat from Florida said...

How clever is that? Never saw this idea before, but I'll try it out. Thanks.

Lori said...

I tried this and it works wonderful. All the threads on the bobbins are secure and not going every where. And the are easy to put on and take off. And a big plus for me is my cat cant get to them and pull out tones of thread. Once I found him with lots of thread wrapped around his legs from playing.
quilting dash lady at comcast dot net

Connie Kresin Campbell said...

Great tutorial Cyn! I've seen them before but forgot all about them. Thanks for the dimensions of the hose!

Anonymous said...

Great tip Cyn. I was just lamenting on the bobbin issue this week as I was cleaning up after a couple of projects. This is my next project!
~Jillian in North Dakota

Kimbra Huber said...

I was just wondering if the edges of the tubing aren't sharp from cutting them and would cut the thread?? It sounded like a good idea till I thought of that.. I was going to use this idea on my good embroidery threads.. email me at happyhubers@gmail.com .. thanks and have a great day