A Tour of my Sewing Room

So Summer is officially over, well at least in terms of the School Holidays, if not Astornomically (we still have 14 days left!), my husband is back to work and Luke and I are getting back to our old routine.

What that means for me is – more sewing time, yeay! I am very fortunate that Luke still seems to be holding onto his naps, which equates to sewing opportunities for me (wait, what? I’m suppose to use the time to clean the house?! Don’t be ridiculous!). Along with more sewing, I have big plans to finally get back to the old Blog and Vlog. I really miss not sharing my sewing adventures on here, and even though I feel that Instagram is really taking over the community aspect of Internet Sewing and I love the instant interaction you get over there, the depth of subject you can get into on a blog post is something I hope we don’t lose. Anyway, that sounds like a whole other subject, you came here for a Sewing Room Tour right?!

Over the Summer, Robin, my husband, very kindly used some of his time off (he is a teacher) to help me finally finish my sewing space. Since we moved into our house 2 years ago, the sewing/guest room had a rather nasty brown carpet in it. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very good quality carpet, but I never like the colour and it was, as you can imagine, a nightmare to clean (threads and pins galore!). On top of that, it made pulling out our sofa bed nearly impossible, taking the joint efforts of both my husband and I. It had to go. So Robin ripped it out, sanded down the floorboards (replacing a few while he was at it…because a small job is never a small job!) and painted them white. Wow, what a difference! I am over the moon with the end result. Such a total transformation, making the room brighter and more functional. Oh, and I can now singlehandedly roll out the bed with ease!

The room is quite a compact one, so it was very important to get furniture which would work hard for me. The back wall is my main sewing space and, as you can see from the photo above, when I have it set up for sewing the trusty Ikea folding table becomes my main sewing surface. In the drawers I have consciously stored things that I might need close to hand while sewing, such as bobbins, sewing machine feet and needles. My lovely turquoise chair (also from Ikea) swivels, which means in the above layout I don’t even need to stand up to switch between sewing machine, overlocker and iron.

Above my desk (which my husband also painted white for me over the holidays!), I have created my work station. The majority of these wall pieces are from the Ikea Kitchen section (yes, Ikea plays a large part in my house decor!) and it’s where I store my scissors, cutting tools, marking tools, rulers and tape measures. I also have a lovely thread spool holder, which I bought on eBay (unfortunately I’ve checked and the seller doesn’t seem to stock them anymore I am afraid). I was very tempted to fill this with a rainbow of thread, but guys, that would have cost me a fortune and I would have ended up with an awful lot of colours I don’t sew with…so sorry, no Pinterest-worthy thread display here, just real life!

The rest of the wall is definitely more decorative. I have embroidery hoops displaying some of my stash fabrics that fit in with the rooms colour scheme. The clip boards hold sewing patterns which again match the scheme – although I do change these out and put up patterns I’m keen to sew up soon. And I have a cork board where I’ll pin up sewing inspiration or sewing plans.

Moving onto the next wall is where most of the storage in the room is. In terms of lay-out the desk is to my back right (window behind me) and the door into/out of the room is to the left of the drawers you see here. I picked up the mannequin years ago from a shop which was closing and selling ‘everything’. She is a lot smaller than me, so not useful for fitting issues, but good for hemming or draping and visualising ideas. To be honest, she gets in the way quite a lot!

The enormous full length mirror is great for checking the progress on makes (or draping fabric around myself and seeing what it looks like, lol!) and mirrors are always a good idea in small rooms to reflect light and add the optical illusion of space.

The drawers hold my fabric stash, patterns and more sewing supplies, such as interfacing, zips and trims. The boxes above the drawers hold a myriad of things from wool, to PDF patterns, to stashed Birthday and Christmas presents! I have a mount on the wall to the left of the drawers where I store my iron when I’m not using it (again, small space issues!) and wrapping paper and my pattern tracing paper (I use this squared paper from Amazon by the way, and think it’s excellent) are stored in wall mounted plastic bag storage (also Ikea!).

I have *gulp* 5 large drawers dedicated to my fabric stash, but I won’t go into any details in this post as I have a vlog coming up on my YouTube channel chatting through some of my stash and storage. I’ll definitely give you a heads up here on the blog when it goes live.

Keeping in our anti-clockwise direction, this is the ‘guest room’ side of the room. My Ikea day bed is a brilliant space to relax and contemplate my next sewing project…ha ha ha. Who am I kidding?! On a normal day it is covered in patterns and fabric and there isn’t a inch of space for sitting!

Anyway, this bed transforms into a king-size bed when we have guests coming to stay (normally my parents actually, who kindly baby sit from time to time). The drawers hold more fabric (yes, more) and bedding.

The shelves to the left of the bed hold my sewing books and magazines.

It’s hard to believe that a king size bed fits into this room, but there is actually ample space to move around once it’s fully open, as you can see in the photo above. The little floral cushion on my bed is actually from Asda would you believe? I just couldn’t resist it. The bedding is also from there too.

I hope you enjoyed a look around my sewing-come-guest room today. If you would like to see it in a bit more detail, I have also uploaded a video tour on my YouTube channel today, so please do follow this link and check it out if you would like to see things in a bit more detail, and see inside a few more drawers!

I’ll be back again soon with a closer look at my PDF pattern storage, some of my favourite vintage sewing patterns in my stash and a riffle through my ever expanding fabric stash.