My Sewing Room

Here it is, my sewing room on a semi-cloudy day. Click on any picture to enlarge. Although...I'm not sure why you'd want to enlarge, because there really isn't much to see! Obviously, I'm a minimalist. I hate clutter. My sewing room is practical, not pretty. I have a lot of room to move around in, and I can move these portable tables around any way I chose. My sewing group meets here because we have ample room and lots of counter space--and plenty of tables to baste quilts on.

Sometimes I think I ought to pretty it up a bit--paint it peach or yellow and hang stuff up on the walls. But I'm afraid that the color of the walls will affect my color choices. I'm afraid I'll start choosing fabrics for quilts that "go" with the paint on my walls. (Don't laugh--sometimes I color-coordinate stuff in my shopping cart without meaning to!) I want the space to be a very neutral backdrop for creating. That way, any colors I choose to work with are the only colors for my eyes and brain to deal with. If I am making a blue quilt, blue is the only color in the whole room. I really love that.

I am NOT responsible for the drab grey morgue curtains that I inherited from the previous house owner. Some day, I plan to take them down, but the cat enjoys leaping from curtain top to curtain top and sometimes sleeps up there. He's just so darn cute I hate to wreck his fun by putting up new curtains. So they've stayed...for eight years. But SOMEDAY, I'll get new curtains for all five giant windows. It should only cost about a million dollars. Gah...

My trusty Bernina has gone a little batty in her stitch length regulator. She can't help it, she's old. My sewing cabinet is a vanity table I got when I was in high school. My husband built me this sewing table around it:

My sewing table is about six feet long and five feet wide. It's great for quilting large quilts that I don't do on my homemade "Gammill".

There are two overhead fans and lots of windows for ventilation. Lots of light all year long, too. Looking the other way down the room. This room is HUGE. My homemade "Gammill" back there in the far left corner (wood and sprinkler pipe, courtesy of my WH) is over 12 feet long. My design wall, which is huge, is over the PVC quilting frame on the far right back. Can you see it way back there? Yes, this room is HUGE, which makes it difficult to photograph! And it has white carpet (also courtesy of the former homeowner) which takes a long time to vacuum.
My "working" stash and current projects are in the white cupboard. (To give you some idea of scale, that white cupboard is taller than me. The top of my head is as tall as the first shelf, so I think the white cupboard is six feet tall. The amoire is probably about eight feet tall. ) The rest of my stash is in those blue plastic stackable containers to the left of the amoire. I really don't have a big stash. I get overwhelmed by too much of anything, so I keep my stash a reasonable size. Besides, it's very hard to just "keep" a fabric collection here! In our damp climate, crowded fabric mildews rapidly. Our perpetual sun works to fade it quickly, also. So we have to "use it or lose it" as they say. My quilt books, thread, supplies, patterns, trims, etc. are in this giant amoire. It holds a lot of stuff! But not too much...did I mention that I don't keep a lot of stuff? I'm constantly getting rid of stuff. I used to have lots of furniture, knick knacks and collections, but life is too short to have to dust all the time! So now I collect air flow. Nice, cool, giant currents of fresh air. Ahhh....

So there you have it. It may be too stark for some people, but I love its clean practicality.