DIY Cat Embroidery Floss Bobbins

As a fan of all things cat related, I couldn’t help but make these adorable cat embroidery floss bobbins from Little White Whale when I saw them a few months back. I also couldn’t help but make them because my embroidery floss has looked something like this for the last few years:

I used the image from little While Whale as inspiration, but kind of went about my own process of creating the little cats. They’re a quick little DIY project that should only take you about 2 hours. Here’s what you’ll need:

cardstock - any colour. I actually found some old packaging for magnetic strips to be a good weight and colour for my bobbins. Bonus points for recycling!
embroidery floss to be wound. I had about 25 different colours, so I made 28 bobbins to have a few extra.
a 2″ ruler (I swear by this one)
an exacto knife
a rubber cutting mat
markers (optional)

To start, I made 5 vertical lines on my cardstock spaced 1 3/8″ apart. I then made 5 horizontal lines spaced 2″ apart. About 1/4″ below each of my horizontal lines, I made another horizontal line as a guide for the ears. This gave me 16 rectangles, so in order to get the remaining 12 I just repeated the process. You don’t have to follow those exact measurements, it’s just what I could fit with the size of scrap card that I had.

Using my exacto knife and ruler, I cut out the rectangles so that they each had a line at the top 1/4″ down. I then drew a diagonal line that went from the corner about 1/4″ in from the side of the card for the ears. Then, I cut out the middle section and was left with a cat shaped rectangle. I could still see some pencil lines on my cats, so I took that off with an eraser, making sure to start at the bottom and go towards the ears. I somehow mis-measured one of my horizontal lines, so 4 of the rectangles came out slightly smaller. But don’t worry if this happens to you, you now just have kitten sized embroidery floss bobbins, which are even cuter, and perfect for shorter lengths of thread 🙂

I wanted mine to be a bit more cat like than the photo I saw, so I used markers to draw a little nose with whiskers, paws at the bottom, and little green eyes. Naturally, I chose the grey and green combo as an homage to my darling cat. Speaking of, that little darling was sitting on my lap the whole time I made these, and turned out to be quite the nuisance when it came time for winding the thread around the bobbins.

To finish them off, I cut about 1/4″ slit near the top and bottom of the left side, and another one on the bottom of the right side. To start wrapping the thread, I wedged the thread through the top slit so that the end was on the back and then just kept wrapping around, covering the end of the thread, until I found the other end of the thread, and then I just tucked that through the bottom right slit so that the end was facing the back again.

Voila! You now have cute, personalized, cat embroidery floss bobbins ready to wrap your embroidery floss around.

This one looks like it’s wearing a huge sweater. hehe