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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Tidy Tuesday - Color coding

When you have a goodly number of children, you need to have some sort of system to keep track of what belonged to whom.  I found it easiest to use color coding.  Can you imagine trying to sort socks when they all look alike?  I sewed a small piece (about 1/2 inch long) of 1/4 inch grosgrain ribbon on the inside of each sock to make sorting easier.  Clothes either had the same type of ribbon sewn in an inside seam or I used a Sharpie pen to write their initial on the inside label.  It really wasn't as tedious as it sounds.  I didn't painstakingly hand sew each tiny piece of ribbon.  A zigzag sewing machine made the job go by really quickly...far quicker than trying to figure out a sock's owner.

Drinking cups and cereal bowls were another thing we color coded.  It would drive me crazy to see a pile of cups on the counter when they were only used to drink water.  So, everyone had their own specially colored cup for water drinking throughout the day.  That was still a lot of cups but I only had to wash one set each day.  I'm lazy that way.  :)  I suppose you could use another way of identifying cups but thanks to Tupperware, I had an easy solution.  It was only logical that if all the cups had a specific owner based on color, that the Tupperware bowls should follow the same pattern.  It worked very well.  Oh, and Dad liked his glass quart jar to drink from so he was unique in his own way.

The only problem arose when a friend or guest would come over and inadvertently take someone's special cup!  Horrors!  Kids can be territorial when they want to be  :)  My kids still go for their own color when they come over.  Thank goodness I don't have to color code their socks and clothes any more!


4 comments:

  1. O.M.G-osh! I just had a thought...you know how the spouses are always struggling to figure out what cup they can use? What if their cup color was the same as their husband/wife? No confusion then. :-)

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    1. Great idea! And I'm sure S will love having a pink cup :)

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  2. I still need to have my green cup...and sometimes look for the blue ribbon at the end of my sock-fish strings...

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    1. If you like, I'll sew ribbon on your socks :)

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