How I got my Sewing Room Back.

Sprite is a sweet, funny, creative little girl. She's also a slob to the nth degree. I've helped her more than once to clean and reorganize her room, but she is sort of like PigPen of the Peanuts in that her room just gets messy again minutes after the chore is done.

A couple of weeks ago, after the umpteenth time commanding asking that she clean up her room, I got frustrated and told her that if she didn't clean up the mess, I would, and if I cleaned it, I would clean it out and move her back into her sister's room and I would take over her room as a sewing room.

That little threat backfired.

She said "Okay! Lets do that!" She was all excited about the prospect. I was floored.

The Divine Miss has the master bedroom and bath of the house and Dear Husband and I sleep downstairs where there is another, slightly smaller, bedroom and bath. Last year, DM's room was painted a brighter purple than I had intended, but it is  a very girly room. Sprite had a much smaller bedroom (9.5 x 10) that was still blue and green from a previous owner's nursery. Moving her into the bigger room gave her more closet space and enough room for the toys she actually plays with, though the doll house had to go down to the basement.

I gave her two days to think it over and change her mind (we had other things we needed to do) and then we started the move. First we rearranged the Divine Miss's things and moved her bed closer to the bathroom, then we changed over all Sprite's things to the bigger room, including the Tinkerbell wall stickers.  She's been in that room over a week now and it is still reasonably neat, with daily reminders from Mama, of course.

It took me 4 days, not counting a trip to DH's home town for a family reunion, to finally move and arrange all my things in the sewing room. I've already done a small project (a t-shirt for DM) to test the machine placement and made a slight adjustment. It's workable and I'm thrilled!

So here are the pictures of this new and improved arrangement:

View from the door -- an actual door that closes and locks if I want to be alone!

My cutting table.  The shelves are Closet Maid cubicals from Target and the top was the cutting board from my JoAnns Sew Essentials cutting table that felt apart.  The cubicals give me lots of storage space for interfacing, elastics and all those other bits and pieces that sewing people accumulate.  The back of the table is held up by the hospital bed side table that can be adjusted up and down.  I needed to find a place for it after we moved it out of the girls' room and I needed a way to hold up the back of the cutting board.  It worked beautifully and is out of the way.   The thing hanging over the cutting table is MeMe -- my vintage wire dress form.  There just wasn't anywhere else to put it.

Two of my Brothers:  2340CV coverstitch and 1034D serger.  The serger is permanently set up for a rolled hem as it does a better job doing rolled hems than my Babylock Imagine.  I would prefer to have the serger cones on the wall like the sewing and embroidery thread, but I used the 3M sticky hooks to hold up the thread racks and the thread is too heavy -- the racks kept falling off the way.  Until I find another solution, they will sit under the table for a while.  The Kenmore and Brother embroidery machines are hidden on the shelf behind the trash can.

My favorite sewing machines:  my Singer 401a from Sew-Classic and my Babylock Imagine.  There is another 401a in the cabinet under the Imagine, but it needs some work yet and I haven't had the inclination lately to work on it.

I removed the sliding closet doors (I did this for the girls' room also) as they kept falling off and limited my access to the closet.  This is about half my fabric stash -- the remaining stash is in the old closet in the basement. The Tinkerbell border remains until I find a border to my taste.

I have a couple more things to do to the room.  I want to hang the thread racks that are missing, I want a full length mirror for fitting, I need to hang the cutting mat for the BigBoard (stored in the closet) so that it doesn't warp and I still need to hang my Jesi Kelley poster that I've been saving for a special place. 

I love this set up the best so far of all my sewing corner arrangements, and I've had quite a few in the last few years.  You can see many of them here, though a number of them including the last one didn't get documented.  DH took over my sewing space (and my peg board!) for his computer work area and the kids' computers.  In fact the entire basement has been taken over by computers -- I am starting to refer to it as the Nerd Cave.  My own computer has a pretty new desk from the American Furniture going out of business sale:

DH loved the desk as it hides away all my messy papers and closes up neatly.  The treadle cabinets give me a little more working space for the days I need to work from home.  The cabinet now holding the printer did hold the Singer 237 but it won't fold down into the cabinet and I don't use it enough to leave it out.  If I do need it, it can go into the Singer 15-88 cabinet temporarily.

This is the desk opened up.  Love the cool little cubbies and the power center for the laptop and phone charger.

So these are my new spaces.  I need to put up the final pictures of our kitchen "remodel" -- that was a project that only took a year and a half to complete.



(Larger pictures are found in my PictureTrail Sewing Corner album)