So New Year's Day, I decided to attack my sewing room. It has been a complete mess for AGES!! I picked up some fancy coloured memory boxes from Michael's (they had them on 6 for $10!) and used them to sort my scraps and off-cuts of fabric by colour! So much easier!!
I put reds/pinks in the pink box, oranges/browns in the orange box and the rest of the colour boxes are self explanatory! The 3 white ones at the bottom will need labels this week. One has all black and white fabrics, one has All black/white background with prints/patterns in colour, and the last one is for charm packs, jelly rolls and other collections that should live together. They are now living on top of my Ikea shelves that have nice doors to cover up the mess!! :) I love how tidy my fabrics look now!! It has inspired me to perhaps start making a rainbow scrappy quilt! Stay tuned!
Here is a look at the inside of the boxes - next step will be to go back through and properly iron and fold all of the scraps and start to trim the scraps into usable pieces (i.e., little squares for a scrappy quilt, etc.).Bigger fabric sets were placed into a bigger bin to keep them together.
I have to say, the project of organizing my fabric was awesome!! I got to look back through fabrics that I have picked up over the past 10 years or so and remember the projects they were purchased for. I was also reminded of some fabrics I have that just haven't used yet!! New project ideas are flooding my brain right now! Too bad I have to go back to school in 4 days!!! :( Hopefully I can get some projects completed this weekend before I head back!
My threads were another mess that needed to be attended to! My Nan, Ruth Smithers, passed away this summer which was an awful experience. My family got together to clean out her house and I have to say, my love of sewing and knitting definitely came from my Nan! My inability to organize and sort my materials also came from her!! :) We cleaned out her house and I inherited much of her sewing and knitting materials. Including an amazing little wooden shelf that my Grandpa (a carpenter) had made up for her to store her thread. I have put it up in my sewing room with all of my different threads and a few other things I inherited from Nan's sewing room.
The last major task was yarn. I love to knit and crochet in the car, on the couch, anywhere! I even have a knit/crochet club at school! You can check us out at APS Stitches. I often do not have a lot of excess yarn, but whenever I finish a project, I don't like to pitch the left-over yarn and some of my projects require 1/20th of a skein, leaving me with LOTS of extra! Some of what you see in the yarn shelf is actually projects that are in-progress! Perhaps one day I will find the time to complete some of those tasks! Who knows! In the top left I have a collection of some of my favourite sewing books, then 3 shelves of yarn, then the bottom right is actually a box full of music books and a box full of trumpet cleaning and maintenance supplies (I am a trumpet player as well!). The bottom right has a plastic shoebox with an in-progress sheep I started to knit on a trip to Montreal last winter! Hopefully I will get back to it again soon. The red thing is a set of wooden drawers. In the drawers are tiny little coloured seashells. They were snagged out of my Nan's attic as well! I remember as a little girl gluing those shells to cardboard making some pretty fantastic pictures! Maybe a fun project for my daughter one day. For now, they have been saved from the dump!So, the grand reveal!! After a few solid hours of sorting, organizing, and reminiscing, I was able to confidently say, "my sewing room is organized!!!" and believe me, my husband was relieved!! :)
Here is what the final space looks like. Just to give some background, when we bought our current house (3+years ago), one of the positives was the big wide open basement. My husband (a plumber and jack of all trades) gutted the basement and then built from the studs. He added a spare bedroom, a beautiful bathroom, a pool table area and a main TV living area. There is space between my sewing space and the TV area for my daughter's toys and stuff as well!! So all 3 of us have a space downstairs to enjoy! So my space, the sewing area, is not huge by any means. But it serves its purpose and gives me a place to work and store all of my stuff!! :) This is what it looks like in the end! My next projects for the space will be looking into peg-board storage, and perhaps some art for the walls! :) We'll sees what happens!
Enjoy! :)
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