So this weekend I finally got a chance to start in on the crazy that is my sewing/craft room. Below you'll find some before pictures that show off the sorry state my room is in. I'm not sure how or when my sewing/craft room got like this, but I'm relatively sure it correlates with when I started doing conventions. The methods employed for maintaining organization worked for my occasional projects here and there, but then more supplies, fabric and notions started filling every nook and cranny whenever there was a convention to prep for. Before I knew it I was inundated with a whole mess of stuff.
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| My cubby shelf that needs some work. |
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| View from the open door. |
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| My sewing/crafting table. |
From the pictures its a little hard to get an idea of the size of the room, let me just say that it is not big. I don't know the exact measurements, never bothered to measure or ask the hubby what size the room was. Just to give you an idea though, the cubbie shelf you see is approx 5' X 4 1/3'. It takes up the majority of the wall that it is currently on, on the left side of the shelf there's about 1 1/2' to 2' of wall space from where the shelf stops to the corner of the room.The table against the back wall is approx 6' long X 2' wide, with about 1 1/2' to 2' of space on either side of the ends of the tables. To the left of the table there is a small rubbermaid set of drawers, which is probably about 2' wide and the ironing board is right next to that, those two items fill up the space on the wall they're against. The ironing board butts right up against the closet. This small room has to accommodate my plethora of hobbies, I'd make a list of those hobbies but it would be long enough to be its own blog post.
It was mentioned in a previous post that I had stumbled across some organization ideas on Pinterest. Well here are two of the pins that provided inspiration:
22 Tips to Organize Your Craftroom and
I Heart Organizing. Between these two there are lots of clever ideas for supplies organization, some of which are adorably cute or very shabby chic. For the purposes of this post though its the way I Heart Organizing organized their closet that I'll be exploring.
As you can see from the before images of my room, its in a state of mayhem and it will likely take a couple of weekends to truly get it ship shape. So to start, it was my decision to begin with the closet storage. It has been the bane of my sewing/craft room ever since I set up in there. I just had no idea how to make it look nice and functional. When I lived with my parents any fabric that had accumulated for projects was kept in plastic under-the-bed storage containers. When I moved in with my husband, those storage containers got stacked on top of each other in the sewing/craft room closet. Not only are these containers hard to maneuver out of the closet, but I can't see the fabric that's in them with out creating an absolute mess of what little floor space my room has.
On Sunday I moved all the bags of stuff (which you can see in front of my cubby shelf and sewing/crafting table in the above before pictures) away from the doors of the closet, and angled the ironing board so that the doors could be opened. With access to the closet achieved, the bins came out and so began the task of figuring out what fabric and how much of each piece of fabric I had. It took me about 6 hours to get through all the fabric. It was a fun process because I was able to rediscover fabric that had been purchased for specific projects that never got beyond the fabric gathering stage. After all the fabric had been measured and refolded, the process of organizing the fabric truly began. This is where I Heart Organizing comes in, in her post she used 5 tier pants hangers to organize her fabric. So using this idea most of my fabric was able to be stored in a visible and vertical fashion in the closet. Below you'll see the before and after images of the closet.
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| Before |
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| After |
Granted the closet has a ways to go still because my ultimate goal is to get the two remaining under-the-bed storage bins out of the closet and replace them with nice baskets/containers. Currently whats left in those two bins are projects that were started and never finished, as well as small but usable pieces of scrap fabric. On top of the two bins are bolts of interfacing and some cotton fabrics, as well as larger pieces of scrap fabric. There's a basket full of ribbons and trims and underneath that are two bins with 35mm movie trailers from my job as a projectionist. Can I just say that I absolutely adore having my fabric hanging the way it is, its so easy to see what I have (and makes me really want to sew). Every piece has been measured and a little green tag safety pinned to each piece that says how many yards and what width the fabric is. On the left side of the closet, tucked away are costumes that I have made for myself over the years. The shelf in the closet needs to be gone through to see what's up there because I'm sure I don't need everything that has been tossed up there. Will probably get some nice bins to put up there as well to keep things tidier. Maybe after this coming weekend I'll be able to finish it up and update you all with what the finished organization of the closet looks like.
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