The New Sewing Space

I lost my sewing room and instead I have a nook. It's one of the closets in our bedroom. The original plan was to move my sewing space into the living room, and there was plenty of room for that, but then I realized that being able to shut the door and be by myself and work on a project, even while other people are in the house, is ESSENTIAL to my mental health. Especially during the weeks when, for various reasons, I don't get my usual alone time breaks where everyone is gone, I need to be able to take an hour here or there to pretend I'm alone :-)

We're still going to make a hinged, drop down, counter height cutting table that lives on the wall of the living room so I can take advantage of toddler free time to do some garment cutting out. I'm still using the same work table as before so I can technically still cut things out but anything longer than these tanks I've been working on went from difficult to nearly impossible in this new cramped space.

Still, I'm liking it just fine and I'm loving our new, toddler free room! And the living room has turned back into a comfortable, uncrowded family space, which is nice (all the toys are now in his room). And all that moving around of furniture and stuff means that we finally got around to consolidating our things after many years of slowly clearing out. Suddenly we have a lot more space in the house because things are compactly and sensibly organized.

In other news, Small apparently grew a lot in the last week because suddenly none of his shorts fit! I had a stash of the next size up from a few swaps on Swap Mamas so we were able to get some out of there. However they're all super long. We've always known Small was built along the lines of a refrigerator. Not chubby any more... as I type this I'm looking at him reading on the couch and I can see all his ribs. But he is a barrel shaped dude. So now I have a bunch of shorts to hem and sewing shorts for him just moved to the top of the sewing queue!

Here are some pics of my new sewing nook:

 There is a lot in there but it works. I'm still loving my rolling sewing cart. It lives to the right and I can slide it out when necessary either to get to stuff on the lower shelves or to find a paper pattern which live rolled up in a trash can in the corner. The light is just a paper light lamp kit slipped through an antique ceiling fan light shade and then wrapped around the curtain rod.

 There is a large shelf up top which holds boxes of various things, not necessarily sewing related, and a narrow shelf under that for all the tins and cups of supplies. Here are my tins and bucket of buttons, my tape (I use mostly digital patterns) and my stapler (which I also use all the time with digital patterns). Below is a picture of more of the narrow shelf with colored pencils, sharpening stones, thumb tacks and the buttons I use for thumb tacks, various pallet knives, brushes, etc. and then some of my mom's old drafting tools from architecture school.

 All my various rulers live on a nail in the door frame. Also some odds and ends on hooks. To the left is a giant roll of cotton-hemp plain weave cloth I use in my etsy shop. Hanging from the curtain rod (curtains instead of doors on these closets) are the Swedish tracing paper patterns clipped together with the clip type curtain rings and then hung there.

On the clothes rod to the right, over my rolling cart, is my queue. I have the prepped fabric draped over hangers. The pattern or instructions are clipped with a binder clip which has a string loop through the handles. That hangs off the hook end of the hanger. If I get my act more together in the future, I'll attach all the necessary notions as well. At the moment I'm just searching for and/or buying notions as each project arrives at the top of my list.