I love all of these ideas and use many myself such as plastic medicine bottles to hold chalk for marking and painters/ masking tape for marking quilts, and also-and maybe i'm just weird, but i use it to tape my thread down to the machine so it doesn't pull out of the needle when i start to sew. Also makes for shorter thread ends to waste. I use an old metal band-aid tin to hold thimbles. And a tackle box for my most used items such as cutter, fabric needle book, safety pins and pin tomato. I also use vinyl and cloth gardening gloves to grip quilt when free motion quilting and when I'm sewing slippery fabrics for other projects.