I almost forgot all about National Sewing Month (NSM) as I’ve been trying to grasp and claw at every last little bit of summer before it goes away. Unfortunately, Fall is arriving despite my best efforts so I need to start turning my mind to inside activities. One of these is sewing. Except… I’ve been avoiding my sewing room. Why? Because this is what I would see when walking upstairs:

I’ve been working around the mess, but just knowing that it looked like that irritated me. To the point where I didn’t want to spend any time up there. Not to mention the fact that as soon as the weather warms up my sewing room turns into a sauna. It’s not fun.

Do you want to take a closer look at my pile of mess?

Just looking at this picture makes me shudder. How did it end up like this?

We had a futon upstairs that just took up a lot of valuable space. This past spring we finally decided to put it out when we had our community junk pick-up. We tried giving it away, but nobody wanted it. So once it was gone I had the empty space. And you know how quickly empty space can attract a mess. To help this I asked Jay to build me shelves for my birthday.

To be completely fair to Jay, he had these made and assembled by the end of May. It was the Finishing Department (me) who got behind. I finally finished them a few weeks ago. Once Jay bought the backing for them we were able to finally get them installed.

There are three sections so Jay screwed them together once they were upstairs. This helps to make them sturdier. If we ever want to move them we just have to undo the screws and separate them. Don’t they look good?

Now, that might look like I have TONS of space. Do yourself a favor and scroll up once again to see the pile of stuff that I had sitting in that area. I’ll wait…

Now that you’re back, here’s how it all got organized:

It still looks slightly messy, but compared to how it was before this is TONS better.

I knew that I had a lot of yarn, but being able to see it altogether made me realize just how much I’ve managed to accumulate. It’s nothing fancy, just clearanced (or on sale) acrylic yarn, but I’ve gone a bit crazy. My goal (hahahaha) is to NOT buy anymore yarn until I have room to fit it into the current yarn area of the shelving. We’ll see how well that works!

The next two sections contains a lot of miscellaneous stuff. I have some beading materials in the little totes, a box of coned thread and bias tape, plus the foam pieces that I lay out when I want to block a crocheted article (and the basin that I use for washing my crocheted articles and cross stitched pieces).

The last section of the shelving unit contains the diaper making fabric, scrap pieces of cotton batting that I procured from my mom, and flannel sheets to be used for random projects. We had enough room at the end of the shelving unit to place the bookshelf where I keep the pillow cases and miscellaneous fabric that I’ve managed to collect. This is kept separately from the fabric that I buy for my dresses.

There were a few things that didn’t quite fit, so I had to find other places for them (the tote in the right of the picture is an example). I still have some organizing to do in the other closet in the room where I stuffed some other things, but for the most part I have everything in its place. And it makes me so happy! It’s amazing how motivated you can be to go play in the sewing room when you don’t dread seeing the mess.

Happiness is an organized sewing room and a cat (or two) for company.

Happy Sewing!