Work Room Makeover (part 1)

I am fortunate to have an entire bedroom in this Dusty Old House to use as a craft room. It is just a bit unfortunate that every wall has at least 1 door or window; makes it a bit difficult to arrange furniture. When I moved everything into the room, I just put the furniture pieces wherever they would fit without much attention to how they would work together. Later I rearranged and things are now in much better configuration. That's the footprint.

The current problem is that with all this storage the things I use are not necessarily located conveniently nor are they organized all that well -- two things that really bug me. Therefore, I have undertaken a tidy reorg project to

• get rid of things I don't and probably never will use again

• organize the things I want to keep

• label the storage containers for easy location of contents

• create a place for everything and put everything in its place

I haven't made it to the label part yet; I'm still working on the purge and organize steps. Purging turns out to be easier than I anticipated; when I come across something that needs to go it's either trash or donate depending on its condition. Organizing is an iterative process with things moving around a bit until I'm really happy with their locations. Labeling I'm saving to the end when I will visit briefly every storage location and use my Brother labeler to make an appropriate label for the bin, drawer or shelf.

One of the things that I did after watching a few YouTube videos was to fold my fabric onto comic book boards. I have fabric for both of my major interests -- book making and sewing. I, therefore, have quite a bit of fabric. Almost all of it is now in mini-bolts folded around acid-free comic book boards; anything too small to wrap around a board is classified as a scrap and is stored in my scrap bin. The boards are arranged by theme, not color; the florals are all together as are the butterflies, etc. These are then stored on edge for visibility in bins to protect the fabric from dust and light. The scrap bin doesn't have much in it at present but the plan is to organize the scraps into plastic bags by color; I don't keep anything smaller than the palm of my hand. As you might imagine, this part of the reorg took a bit of time, but I think it will make finding and using my fabric much easier than just having fat quarters and yardage stuffed into drawers.

As a result of all this tidy reorg activity, there hasn't been much sewing or book making going on. I hope to return to all that by the end of the week. Meanwhile, stay tuned for photos of the finished work room.

dks, 9 Nov 2025