How many stay-cations have I sworn to spend cleaning my closet once and for all, exploring those mystery boxes in the attic, or some other noble endeavor. As if.
But on a recent winter holiday I vowed that I would finally unpack my sewing supplies and set up a sewing room that had been
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My newly organized sewing notions!. |
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waiting patiently for me for more than two years.
More than two years ago, I moved out to Long Island from Brooklyn, after my husband and I had spent the two years previous to that painstakingly, weekend by weekend, gutting a very dilapidated 1960s split-level ranch and transforming it into a wonderful home.
The sewing room had started out as a leaky, bug-ridden laundry room in a basement in-law apartment. But we took down the moldy walls, sealed the concrete, tiled the floor, and rebuilt it as a sewing studio from the ground up, all the way to the counter-high outlets spread every two feet around the perimeter of the room. It was painted the softest and loveliest of latte pinks and in the late afternoon the sun streamed golden light through the corner basement windows.
When we moved, I packed up my many boxes of sewing supplies in my Brooklyn apartment and dreamed of my new dedicated sewing space and all I would make.
Then I moved a bed into the sewing studio, and it became a guest room.
I kept sewing, but became a vagabond sewist, roaming from kitchen table to living room floor, working out of a portable sewing kit.
It remained that way for two years, until last fall when I took the job of editor at Stitch and came to live in Boston part-time. The bed went to Boston and I took my sewing room back.
Over the holidays, I spent 3 days unpacking my sewing room. I filled more than three dozen Mason jars full of five of every notion: seam rippers, beeswax, bodkins, you name it. I have three grandmothers' worth of sewing supplies (my husband’s, my step-mother’s, and my own), a wall of fabric stash and an authentic sewing store cabinet stuffed with patterns.
I love my new sewing studio and spend much of my life in it, working on Stitch and sewing projects. I know there are more like me out there, whose sewing studios have morphed into guest / junk rooms. All I can say is: Take back your sewing studios!
P.S. I got the ideas for storing my notions in Mason jars from the Winter 2011 issue of Studios. It’s one of my mostfavorite magazines, appealing to both my voyeuristic inclinations and insatiable appetite for brilliant storage ideas.
Do you have a tale of taking back your sewing studio? Share it on the Sew Daily blog.
Happy stitching. For real!