My Sewing Room

For my first post I'll share my tiny sewing room.  It is the walking around part of the laundry room, sad but true.  I have other space in the home to put it but nowhere that I can stay up late at night sewing without disturbing others.   These photos are older and I've made a few changes since but I'll start with these.

One thing to know about me, I buy almost nothing new.  I redo, revamp, thrift, skimp and get by on everything.  In fact, the only thing I see in this picture that I bought brand new is the serger (Baby Lock).  I bought the Baby Lock sewing machine/embroidery machine used on eBay.  The sewing table is a fold-out plastic table from COSTCO, like the one leaning against the wall in the pictures below.  I used a paisley sheet from the thrift store for the top of the table cloth and the top of the "bench".  I buy a large majority of my fabric from thrift stores, as other items and reuse it for my purposes.  So all this gorgeous fabric probably cost me less than $10.  Maybe I'll try to keep up with what fabrics costed me for future project posts, so I can really rub it in....just kidding.

The "bench" is a storage tote covered with two padded cushions and the topper.  I store fabric in it and sit on it to use the sewing machine....and this is maybe only 1/10th of my fabric.  Oh yes, the table skirt is hiding at least 4 bins of fabric.  Did I mention that I am a fabric hoarder...more on that later.  The bottom green portion of the table cloth (and tote topper) is a velvety fabric reused from thrift store tab top curtains...believe that they were Target brand.    

Along with the chair cover.  

So about this chair.  I would have preferred a fuller skirt, more gathered like the tablecloth but that is another thing that you'll learn about me.  I work with what I have.  I was down to the last panel of curtains that I had bought from the thrift store.  So I just made it work, with less gathering.  I had the same issue on the tablecloth.  See how nice and even the gathering is on that....well the back corner isn't quite so evenly gathered for about 5 inches as I saw I was running out of panel.  Was I going to rip it out and start over?  Heck no, not when I would never see that portion anyway.  And was I going to use a piece of that last panel to add to it to make it perfect?  Heck no.  Not when that ugly black office chair was looking at me begging to be made a matching set.   And I was already out of the paisley topper fabric.  I'd have better photos of the handiwork if I'd known I would be blogging this but notice the embroidery at the bottom of the chair skirt.  You can barely see it because it is white.  I actually used a fancy sewing machine stitch for that.  

Also notice some unfinished projects in the background....one of the major purposes of this blog.  So I'll mention them in passing but I will not focus on them because they will be gone soon....I just know it.