I sew...here

I don't have a sewing/craft room.

I read a lot of blogs from a lot of talented and creative people. And often they mention the sewing room or the craft room and occasionally show pictures of these wonderful spaces. And I get, I'm not too proud to mention, really jealous.

In my house I have half a cupboard in the study (which is really a spare bedroom) and my sewing machine is more or less permanently set up on one end of the dining table.
While this is OK in theory the cutting mat almost always ends up gracing the other end and we eat sitting on the couch in front of the TV, which drives my partner crazy. And pulling everything in and out of the cupboard all the time really cuts into my limited sewing/crafting time.

So over the last few months I have been trying to make thing more organized and accessible and keep my bits and pieces a little more contained, for everyone sake. I like a clean and tidy house as much as the next person (my mum thinks maybe more so... if she could see it now).

The first thing I did was take out some huge tubs I had in the hanging section of the robe and get these little hanging shelves with drawers from IKEA to make my (ever growing) fabric collection a little more organized and easy to access.


I have drawers for garment fabric, upholstery fabric, scraps of batting and interfacing, scraps, pre-cuts and yardage.

The tubs underneath hold patterns, separated into craft and garment and form an essential purpose to provide some stability to the handing drawers.

Then last weekend I took the scrap drawer out,


pressed everything that I had just shoved in there over the last little while,


and cut them into 10, 5, 3 or 2.5 inch squares.


There are still quite a few scraps left I can't bear to part with but I have some ideas of how they might be used.

I have stored the smallest two squares in these little boxes, again from IKEA.



Why all this effort? Well, recently my partner got a new job which will mean a move for us from Sydney to Melbourne in the next few months. And I am hoping against hope with without much foundation that we can move somewhere with a sewing room. I have wonderful ideas about how I could organize it and work in it and how I could shut the door on all the little bits and pieces that, however well organized, make a craft area look messy at the end of the day.