Studio Tour

This is my room. We call it the quilt room, but really, it has all of my creative stuff in it. I thought I'd provide a little tour today, as I get myself reacquainted with it.

The first thing you see at the top of the stairs as you walk in is my sewing machine. It's a lovely Bernina, and I have a nifty sewing table that will let me sew completely flat (as shown here) or with the sewing arm exposed (if I raised the lower platform to table height). I usually leave the machine set as shown, because it's most convenient for quilting.

Here is the view beyond my sewing machine. It's a cold slushy day today, but within the next 3 months, the lake (which looks like white snow but is really ice in this pic) will rise and the water level will be even with the top of the stone wall across the cove. That's our ice-locked dock you see in the lower left of frame. Today is a perfect day to be in the studio.

I keep my ironing board set to the same level as my sewing table. When I'm working on blocks, I can swivel my (incredibly comfortable work chair) between the sewing machine and the iron without having to stand up or change work levels.

The baskets on my sewing table are full of scraps - part of the preparation blocks I'm working on for my upcoming design class in May. More about that in another post.
Opposite the windows in my studio is the fabric wall. Originally, this was a bedroom and the double bed used this wall as a headboard. I put my secondary work table here with fabric floor to ceiling on one side and quilt and design books on the other. The objects hanging from the cabinet doors are lovely handmade paper dolls that I brought back from Japan in 1993. The colors have faded but they came from the Berami Doll Shop in Matsumoto - a store I wish I'd been able to spend a lot more time and money in when I was there.
In case you thought my fabric stash was a little small, here's what's inside those cabinets. Some of it is organized by color, some by origin (for example, I have two shelves of Senegalese cloth, one of Japanese fabrics, and another of Hawaiian materials. And don't get me started on the antique kimonos with the hand painted silk linings...). I have a lot of fabric. To the right of the fabric wall is my design wall. I covered the entire wall with five yards of white felt, stapled to the original horrible paneling. This wall is where I do my big design work before I sew.

The wall opposite my design wall is the storage wall. The original homeowners built drawers into the walls, under the eaves when they dormered out this floor of the house. These drawers, and the closet, house the rest of it all - paper, paints, threads, yarn, beads, scrapbook stuff, buttons, ribbons, and all the rest.

It's a good room. I hope to see more of it this year.