A Rainbow on Bobbins: The Floss Behind the Tiny Charms

Every so often I open my floss box and just… look at it for a minute. Can you blame me?

This is some of the embroidery floss I use to knit my tiny badge charms and keychains, all wound up neat on their little bobbins and sorted into a rainbow. It’s part supply stash, part mood board, and honestly part therapy. There’s something about a tidy row of color that makes the whole room feel calmer before I’ve even picked up a needle.

People are sometimes surprised that I knit with embroidery floss instead of yarn — but at the scale I work, it’s perfect. Each stranded cotton floss is fine enough to render the kind of detail a charm needs: the stripe on a bee, the curve of a tiny wing, the smallest little face. Yarn would be too bulky and blur all those features together. Floss keeps everything crisp and miniature, which is exactly the charm of a charm.

It also comes in every color imaginable, which brings me to the fun part.

I store my floss wound onto bobbins and arranged by color family — blues into purples, hot pinks into reds, oranges into golds, the whole green section, and then the neutrals and the deep, useful black. Each bobbin gets a little numbered tab so I can find a shade again, and re-order it when I’m running low. (That mint green #504 and the soft peach #24 in the front are two I plan on using soon for an adorable little lizard.)

Winding floss onto bobbins is a slow, fiddly job, but I’ve come to love it. It keeps everything from turning into the dreaded tangle, and laying the colors out side by side is half of where my design ideas come from. I’ll be winding a new shade, set it next to its neighbors, and suddenly that’s the palette for the next batch of charms.

When I sit down to start a new piece, this box is where it begins. I’ll pull a handful of bobbins — maybe a sunny yellow and black for a bee, a few greens for something leafy, a soft pastel for a sweeter design — and build the little color story before a single stitch is knit. The charm grows from there, one tiny strand at a time.

So the next time you clip one of my charms onto your bag, know that it started its life right here, somewhere in this rainbow.

🌈 Curious what’s coming out of the floss box next? New charms and keychains land in the shop regularly — come see which colors made the cut.