Helen's Sewing Room

Meet Helen and my mom. Helen is a dear family friend that I've known all my life. She and her husband Chet have been family friends since they and my parents met in college way back in the late 1950's. Their kids and my brother, sister and I grew up together, but it has been several years since I've seen them. Recently my folks were in California for a visit and my brother decided to tape Helen's sewing room for me and so I thought I would share Helen's sewing room with all my friends here. You'll even see my mom--she's the fiery red head.

Helen, I just love that big corner window you have. Great light and a pretty view too and if you call your stash messy you'll die when you see how I keep mine! LOL! Love your sewing machines too! Thank you Helen! Hi Mom!

It's Here!

It's here! It's here! My favorite magazine, Where Women Create! And it's fabulous as always! Filled to the brim with lots of eye candy and inspiration! This magazine never disappoints.

As always there are fabulous artists in it like Mary Engelbreit and oh so many others!

Nicol Sayre (one of my absolute faves!) is in there and what a beautiful studio she has! Such treasures and inspiraton!

Ruth Rae an absolutely fabulous artist and another fave is also in this issue and Ruth has a super cool studio filled with sooo many fun things to create and play with!

Joanna Figueroa another great artist is also in this issue. Joanna is actually fairly new to me and that's another thing I love about Where Women Create is that I can meet artists that I'm not familiar with or don't know much about and learn about them and their works.

When I first picked it up I went immediately to Nicol and Ruth's pages and drooled over them and then quickly flipped through oohing and ahhing the others, not knowing where to start! I'm now waiting for the drool to dry, so I can read the rest of the magazine!

Where Bloggers Create Blog Party--Come On In!

Welcome to the Where Bloggers Create Party hosted by Karen Valentine of My Desert Cottage.
Many of you have seen my sewing room, but some have not and so I've decided to show you pictures from my last 3 sewing rooms and my current sewing room. It all has the same stuff for the most part (it does seem to keep growing however), but set up in different rooms. So come along.........

This was my sewing room when we lived in Florida. It was in the front of the house in what was a sitting room......

My sewing room when we first moved back to Idaho. This one was a rather small, cramped office, but it worked.

And this is my favorite sewing room in our last house. It was in the basement, so I had plenty of room to spread out.

A view of one of the work areas.....

The corner with my little Singer Spartan machine. A great machine to use.....

Betty and Mae's corner......

And now for the entrance to my sewing room in the house we are currently living in. Sorry for the mess, but this shot was when were still unpacking. However I still haven't uppacked my room this time totally. We are only here in this house for a short time and I just can't seem to get my room together.....

My current sewing room is again in the basement--the best place--that is if it's a finished basement. It has lots of barn wood, which I do like and if I can ever get it put together it would be offset with lots of shabby cottage, old linens, laces, roses etc......

Where I store part of my fabric......

A corner....this is where my drafting table is, for cutting, planning and such.....

And a few favorite corners......I love using cake stands, because they are not only great for decor, but they expand my storage surface. I have 3 cake plates on the hutch in my sewing room.....

Top part of the hutch in my sewing room. I picked this up in Florida at a thrift shop for 40.00 and it gives me lots of display area as well as storage with drawers below......

Just a few favorite pieces.....

...and a few more.......

I hope you enjoyed your tour of my sewing rooms and don't forget to click on the banner at the top of the post, so you can tour all of the other wonderful places that bloggers create.

Creative Spaces

One of my favorite things to search on the net is peoples creative spaces--sewing rooms, sewing studios, art studios, crafting spaces whatever it is that each person refers to their creative space as.

Have you seen my Blog Roll by chance. I made it, it's own blog page, because I have so many blogs that I like to follow and read (and it really needs updating, because I'm always finding more!) and it would be impossible to list them all here and that is also where I have a really cool list of other peoples creative spaces. If you too enjoy other people's creative spaces than click the big link--Creative Spaces below and you can tour the few that I have listed. There are some gorgeous rooms filled with lots of beauty and inspiration. Enjoy!

Creative Spaces.....HERE

Ta dah! The Clean Sewing Room!

Ok, brace yourselves! The following pictures are disgraceful.......................... Donna Balfanz--don't look!

See I warned you! This is or WAS my messy, awful sewing room. So I decided that for 2009 I was going to get back on track and get re-organized! Beware--still a few more messy photos to follow......

Ok, now you can look! Ta Dah! See it's all cleaned up and nice and neat and I can think and work and find stuff!

I skirted the tables--something Donna talked me into a few years ago and now the tables have their skirts back. All I did was rip my fabric to the right size and hot glued it to the under edge of the table. Then if I need to remove the skirt for some odd reason I just peel it off and then it can re-glued when I'm ready.

I decided to add a row of lace to the top of the skirts, which doesn't show up here too well, but is very pretty in person.

My hutch, which still needs a bit of organizing and don't even ask about the insides of the drawers. However I will be organizing those too--but a little later.

I told the husband that I need something to fill this little corner that was wasted space and this is what he came up with. He had the pegboard in the garage just sitting, so he added a piece of wood to extend the table--which will get covered as soon as I find my wallpaper. Then he added the little wire baskets that I'm still working on filling up.

Mae in her new corner. Her skirt is part of a bridal veil that I trimmed down the fullness of and decided to make this piece her new skirt!

This corner had a big, ugly green couch sitting in it that we moved into a small room around the corner. I plan to add a couple of easy type chairs for sitting and sewing.

The biggest thing I did to help with my clean up this time was to purchase some storage totes and get rid of the old cardboard boxes I had, which not only looks nicer--even if they are hidden under the skirts--but the hold more than the boxes did.

The next big help was adding the skirting, so you can't see the ugly storage area under the tables.

Ah! I feel so much better!

The Pit--A Challenge With A Giveaway Attached

Here it is--The Pit! Well ok, so actually it's my sewing room, but it looks like a pig pen. Does your sewing room ever get to this point? I haven't been very creative for quite sometime and can't seem to get with the program and when I do sew you'd think I didn't have a clue what I was doing and I've sewn all my life! I must need a major recharging is all I can figure.

So my goal for this week it to get this place cleaned up and whipped back into shape and we'll see if that helps with the wanting to create again or not. Who knows what wonders or treasures I might find as I clean it all up. Maybe it will be more of an adventure than a job. Well I can dream can't I. LOL!

If you have a pit or sewing room/work studio whatever you call yours and it's in dire need of a good cleaning up I Double Dog Dare ya to post pics on your blog, so we can all see too and so I won't feel so bad. LOL!

Now for the Giveaway part!

Enter and Win a Handmade Pincushion by me

(no picture available due to my messy room and it won't be made til after this Friday when I have The Pit cleaned up)

Now til Monday June 9th

Take a picture of your sewing/crafting/workroom area--HOWEVER it MUST BE A MESS! Post the picture on your blog and then add your name and blog link to the Mr. Linky below.
All you have to do is post the messy pictures. We won't make you clean it up. You have until next Monday the 9th to get the courage up. Then on Tuesday June 10th I'll post a poll and we'll let the readers of Blogland choose their favorite messy sewing/crafting/workroom area. The polls will be open through Friday June 13th and the winner will be announced on Saturday June 14th.

I Double Dog Dare You!

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Quilt Guild Sewing Room Tour

This past week I finally made it to our local quilt guild meeting for the first time and just in the nick of time! They were holding a Sewing Room tour today! There were 8 sewing rooms on the tour--4 of which I made it to and 2 of which I took photos of.

This first one was my overall favorite! It's hard to tell, but she had a huge space and all organized into stations. This first picture is the area where she did her sewing, had her design wall and part of her stash. There was also a wonderful walk in closet with even more fabric and goodies--you'll just have to imagine that part.

The design wall is made from the poly styrofoam stuff you can get at home building stores and then she capped off the ends with some metal piece--made for capping off stuff--very technical I know. Then she covered it with muslin. This beautiful quilt she said she had started over 20 years ago and is a hand applique using the bias method.

A nice little corner to work in with her light box and yes the lady with the dog is the lucky owner of this beautiful sewing studio. Her name is Dee.

Another view of this part of her studio and part of her stash.

Now we are out in the larger area of her studio. A beautiful antique sewing machine where she stores her many quilting rulers. This pretty little cabinet is where she stores some of her bolts of fabric. What a nifty idea! A view of her sitting area for hand stitching and you can see just a bit there in front of the chair to the left is where she has a quilt frame set up with a Grandmother's Flower Garden on it.
The walls in her studio are a beautiful robin's egg blue--not the gray or lavendar that is showing up.

What a neat cutting table. There are leaves that fold up on both ends and each of those drawers are neatly stuffed with fat quarters!

This gorgeous sewing room was complete with a fireplace! What a wonderful place to sit and sew on a cold snowy winter day. And what a perfect place for the tv--it's not taking up valuable shelf space.

At each home we signed their guest log and there was a paper pieced pattern of a different little house waiting at each one, which made a nice little treasure to take home--especially since I like little house blocks.

I also learned a neat tip from one gal--she had rolls of paper on a heavy dowel hanging from her ceiling and she said it was Sani Paper--like what you find on the beds in a doctors office. It can be purchased cheaply she said, from medical supply stores and she said it was great for tracing paper and that it was her favorite paper to use of paper piecing. This same lady also used a file holder/sorter much like this one....

http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=307697&Ntt=plastic%20sorter&uniqueSearchFlag=true&An=text

to hold her sewing rulers and she had some quite large rulers that sat in it and it's much cheaper than most of the quilting ruler holders.

I hope you enjoyed this little peek into the Sewing Room Tour as much as I did. I think it would make a great tour idea for any quilt guild and I can't wait til next year--I'm going to go to all of them!