This is where I sew!
I'm inordinately proud of myself for resisting the urge to clean up that shelving before taking pictures. (I did clean off the sewing table - but I had just finished sewing Ralphie's button-down shirt so I would have done that anyway.) I really wanted to show you what this space really looks like (check out the giant piles of tilt-y fabrics and WIPs on the top of the shelf.)
I sew in my kitchen and I really love being in the main part of the house with some natural light and a few hidden spaces to contain my stuff. But sewing is a materials-intense activity and it's the main thing I struggle with. I'm a fairly visual person and I love having fabrics and things 'out' enough to be inspired by them. At the same time, this is a heavily-trafficed area of the house where we cook several meals a day (not to mention that the enclosed cupboards and drawers in the shelving unit contain most of Ralphie's toys).
The top three rows of shelving (and the entire area on top) are given over to sewing stuff. I try to store things in pretty containers and keep like with like as much as possible. The basic system I set up hasn't changed too much since this post. It's certainly messier, but this is basically that system in real life in a place I use all of the time.
One of the very first things to go up in this space was the pegboard. If you don't have one, you should totally get one! Scissors and tools and rulers and thread and measuring tapes and hoops . . . it's all here and easy to find. It's also very easy to put this stuff away and out of the reach of small people. Little things like my seam ripper and hem ruler and fabric marker are in a mug on the windowsill. That's where I keep my tin of pins too.
I love those mini bolts of quilting cotton. My patterns are right underneath them, ready to flip through. That bucket-y thing holds scraps of pattern tracing stuff and when I have a little piece to trace, I dig through it.
All in all, I like this space a lot. I do need to find a very bright working light for the table. During the day, there's adequate light from the window (and at any given moment you can see doodles taped up there so that I can trace them for embroidery), but as soon as the sun starts to set, I can barely see at all. The kitchen is lit by moody and dim pot lighting which is . . .a bizarre choice to say the least.
