Where I Sew – the details…

There were so many lovely comments and questions about my sewing room when I was featured on Pink Chalk Fabrics Where I Sew series recently that I thought I’d take a little time to tell more about my space.

My sewing room is one of the bedrooms in our house.  It is about 10 feet by 10 feet and a few inches.

My husband built the L shaped counter for me about eight years ago.  It goes all the way from the wall on the left to a couple of feet from the wall on the right.  The drawers and chair were picked up at a local resale shop.  The space behind the curtain includes two halves of a plastic shelving unit that I already owned.  I store batting,  fusible webbing, my non-quilting cotton fabrics and some shipping and vending supplies under there.  The curtain is three separate pieces on spring tension curtain rods that fit underneath the edge of the counter.  One commenter remarked how easy it would be to change the look of the room by making new curtains and recovering the chair.  That is certainly true – but it has been like this since it was built!  This room is well-used and could use a bit of paint and an update, but it is hard for me to stop sewing long enough to do that 🙂  The funny thing about the chair cover is that I made it to cover the original chair upholstery which, at the time, I thought was a hideous orange.  I like orange a lot more now so it would be fun to take a peek and see if I like it better now.

Despite the fact that the lovely cutting space is often covered with papers and piles of fabric, it is wonderful to use when it is clean like this!  The room gets amazing natural light and ventilation, but I knew I needed some good lighting as well for nighttime sewing.  I totally lucked out with the lighting I have.  I was telling a close friend of mine about what I was looking for and some of the ideas I had and she turned out to have this lighting just sitting in her basement!  She had remodeled her kitchen not long before and purchased the lighting for it, but it didn’t work out and she wasn’t able to return it (I can’t remember why) so she just gave it to me!

To round out the tour of the room, the wall on the far right behind the pressing station is my design wall.  The wall on the far left includes some shelving for my books and papers and a closet where I store most of my fabric.  I did a post last year about my fabric storage.  The picture above is taken from the doorway.

Several people remarked that they liked my pressing area.  I do too, but it came about in an accidental way.  I used to have a regular ironing board in that space.  When I bought my new sewing machine last fall, I also bought a table that it fits into.  The one disadvantage of my space is that there is not a lot of room behind my sewing machine for machine quilting.   When I quilt a big quilt, I put the machine in its table and place the table into the corner of the counter top.  This does block access to my drawers, but gives me a good amount of space for the quilt during quilting.  The problem was – what to do with this table when I’m not quilting?  It didn’t fit in the room and there is nowhere else near my sewing room that I could store it easily.  I had a large rectangular piece of glass (from an old coffee table) in my sewing room that I sometimes used like a light box and it fit the top of the quilting table almost perfectly.  So I wrapped some quilted, Teflon ironing board fabric that I got at Joann around the glass and set it on the table.  My husband also added casters to the table legs to make it easy to move around.  The boxes on the floor house the scraps I’ve cut up into 4″ and 5″ squares to try to get me to use them more 🙂  (Update on that project coming soon)

So there you have it!  It is a really good space that functions well as long as I can keep from bringing too much stuff into the room and remember to clean as I go.  I think that’s a problem we all have no matter how big our spaces are 🙂

3 Comments
  • Rachel
    Posted at 15:47h, 22 July Reply

    Gorgeous! I love seeing the sewing rooms of others!!

  • Molly
    Posted at 17:11h, 16 July Reply

    Yes, could your husband please stop at my house also? LOL! It's so nice to see where your creativity flows from …. very nice work space!

  • Charlotte
    Posted at 07:59h, 16 July Reply

    what a great room! Can I please borrow your husband, though – he sounds pretty useful! 😉

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