Hello 2016

Happy New Year!   I hope you all had a great Christ­mas and enjoyed the New Year’s fest­iv­it­ies.   New Year is my favour­ite hol­i­day, I love a good party and, even though this year’s was a little quiet, it was nice to wel­come in the New Year and all its pos­sib­il­it­ies with our friends.   The 1st of Janu­ary is a blank slate just wait­ing for us all to fill in the story.  Let hope its a pos­it­ive, pro­duct­ive and peace­ful one everywhere.

I found the cute little note­pad on Pin­terest recently.   Its from Creme de la Craft and is avail­able as a free down­load from her site.      It’s ador­able isn’t it!   I have mine hanging on the Vis­ion Board I picked up from Kikki K when I was doing my Christ­mas shopping.

To kick things of for 2016 I thought I’d give you all a little tour of my new sew­ing space.   It’s taken a while to get everything togeth­er but I am very happy to report that thanks to a post Christ­mas trip to Ikea with my sis­ter it is fin­ished.   It’s clean, white and bright and all the messy things are stored out of site which I love.

I’m not nor­mally an Ikea girl but the Alex table and Rober­get Chair were kinda per­fect for the space so I grabbed them both.  Inside one of the draw­ers I’ve popped all of the things I need when I’m at the machine.   Note the num­ber of seam rip­pers — they’re my best friends!

I built the cut­ting table myself after see­ing Kar­en Ack­va’s Ikea hack from a few years ago.   The con­struc­tion meth­od was very sim­il­ar to Kar­en’s table but my table is a fair bit big­ger and it has wheels so that I can move it around the room.  It’s also double sided with the same com­bin­a­tion of draw­ers and cup­boards on both sides.

In case you’re inter­ested I used:

• 2 Kal­lax 4x2 bookshelves
• 2 packs of Rill castors (only six were used)
• 3mm MDF board cut by my loc­al hard­ware 15mm short­er and nar­row­er than the two book­shelves together
• a white lam­in­ate kit­ten bench top from my loc­al hard­ware (I have a spare bench top if any­one in Bris­bane is look­ing to build their own cut­ting table).

I love hav­ing everything organ­ised and packed away so that I can access it when I need to without everything being on dis­play.   Most of the draw­ers con­tain sew­ing notions and craft sup­plies but they’re also per­fect for fat quar­ters too (it’s like Ikea knew I’d have a few!).

I used half of of the cup­boards as they came pack­aged from Ikea and the oth­er half got a little make over.   I cut the back out of them with a stan­ley knife so that I had a place to store bolts of fab­ric, long rulers, etc.     The sides were a little floppy so I got my hus­band to pop a few a couple of small screws in each one to hold them in place.   They may not be pretty but they are one of my favour­ite fea­tures of this cut­ting table.

My sew­ing space used to be a lounge room and I was­n’t sure that I wanted to give it up com­pletely.   I also did­n’t want to have my sew­ing room on dis­play as people walk through the house from the front door so I com­prom­ised and kept some of the fur­niture I used to have in there.

I still get to have my ‘ladies lounge’ where I can sit and relax and, bonus, I have a great design floor with no passing traffic to get in the way!   I could­n’t be happier.

I also wanted to give a quick shout out to every­one who viewed and down­loaded my Goose­berry Star Patch Quilt from the Moda Bakeshop.   I just read this morn­ing that it was the num­ber 3 quilt for the year on the Bakeshop and I am truly humbled and grate­ful to you all.  Thank you so much.