If you have some extra money laying around AND decent eyesight, you can do what I just did yesterday. I realized that I didn't have enough different colors of twist tie and the white twist ties were so glaring that it made the flowers in my front yard look funny.
Paper clips were a little too thick for me to get around the flower securely (we get high winds here, so I can't hang a paperclip loosely), so that wasn't an option for me.
I did two things:
1) I found some old USB cables and stripped them, which gave me 8 colors to choose from (orange on white, orange, brown on white, brown, etc...). These are good, but the white ones were still a little flashy and I needed more colors, so then I went to JoAnne Fabrics and...
2) I purchased colored wire like they use for jewelry-making. Here is a link to it online:
http://www.joann.com/26-gauge-... It isn't the cheapest stuff in the world, but a little goes a LONG way. I chose 26 guage because it's so much thinner and more discrete, but they have other guages of wire, too, if you don't want it to be quite that thin. This works great because when you run out of single/solid colors, you can twist two (or three...) colors around each other and use as many combinations as you need. This wire is a little more difficult to see, but I love that about it because it's more discrete so that my neighbors don't see the wires hanging and I still have them 'tagged' and identifiable.
Here is an example of some of the colors I used:
Click the picture below to see the whole thing:
(Sorry for the sideways photo, I tried to rotate it but it keeps appearing sideways when I upload it, regardless of how I edit and save it on my computer.)
It might be hard to tell from the picture, but the first one is combined colors of metallic wire (green on gold), the second one is a single color (purple), the third one is another combination of metallic wire (black on pink), and the fourth is USB wire (brown on white). The white paper behind it was to help you see it against the dark countertop, but it parlays into how I organize them. Since I created a color combo for all (but three) of my daylilies, it's hard to sift through that many looking for the one I want. I was going to use a narrow cardboard box until I found an old Radio Shack cassette tape holder in my basement. Instead of throwing the cassette tape organizer away, I turned it into a handy little hybridizing wire organizer!
