I used to care about the colors when I did cross stitch but now, I just use what colors I have. Periodically, I go through my floss to see what color grouping I am missing, but when I go to the store, I pick any red, any purple, etc. that suits me at the time.
I do have lots of black and white and tons of green as I like doing flowers and foliage, it seems. I never got the colors right when I did cross stitch anyway…so it depends on your style as to if you need the color number, I guess.
When I first learned to cross-stitch (many moons ago) , I had to have exactly the right color the patterns called for. But now alot of what I do, I normally just pick what I think looks good. I do try to use what ones I have that it calls for. But instead of getting bummed because i don’t have a color, I definitely improvise.
My storage before was the bobbins and the storage box like @Magpie 's, but now it’s just on the bobbins hung on a ring. I’ll probably go with a different way of storing them though cause I don’t really care for the ring.
I saw a girl use clothes pins of all things and then had them nicely hung on a board. It looked pretty handy and very cute!
I ended up separating colors into snack Ziploc bags and putting them in a photo box. All the greens in one, the browns, the reds, etc are together. I’ve been keeping tabs on the floss colors in my Google docs. I gave the unlabeled floss to my ma who does embroidery.
I have a few that lost their number. I also, put them back for other projects.