Moving in to the new studio

Last week saw us move our son into his new bedroom, which means his old bedroom was now free to become my studio.

(happy dance, happy dance, happy dance!)

The first order of the day was moving all my fabric into the cupboard.  The fabric had been living in cardboard boxes on the floor of our bedroom.  Not convenient to use, nor convenient to walk around.

Just that one little job made a huge difference to the usability of the house and to how much I loved the new room!  Seeing all my pretties nicely loaded up on clean white shelves was such a great feeling, immediately inspiring and I kept seeing intriguing colour combinations that I hadn't noticed before.

But there was no time to start playing with fabric!  I had to get the design walls up.  They had also been resident in my bedroom, just leaning against the wall, in the way, with the annoying habit of falling on me in the middle of the night.  Hubby helped out a little here.

I unpacked my HQ Sweet Sixteen and was very relieved that after a year in storage, she still purred - that is once I put the needle in the right way around....!

I've set up my Bernina 440 and the Sweet Sixteen in front of the windows with a work table in between, so I'll have plenty of light for working during the day.  And if it gets too bright, the curtains seperate so I can pull them to exactly where I need them.  I have to have my cutting mat and ironing pad on that worktable for now, which is not the best height, but workable, and there is a little storage underneath.

The wall opposite the windows was the only big full wall, so that's where the design wall had to go, and I wanted my design wall big.  I've never, ever regretted a large design space and in my opinion the bigger the better.  It gets plenty of light for viewing quilts, and for taking photographs too.

I have a set of drawers set up under the pre-existing shelf and tools hanging from under the shelf.  Eventually I'd like to have a bigger set of drawers here, wider and slightly longer and at bench height.  It would have my cutting mat set up on it at perfect cutting level.

In the picture below I'm standing in the doorway to the room.  Behind the open door is another door that leads into our bedroom.  It's a leftover from when this sewing room was a porch, and we never open it.  We have plans to take it out and build a recessed book shelf where it is, so that will help with storage.

I was all set up and ready to sew this weekend just been.  Conveniently it rained, so I had the perfect excuse to test out my setup the WHOLE weekend.  And I'm very, very happy.  I need a better sewing chair, preferably with wheels that can swap from machine to machine and then everything will be perfect!  Happy sigh.