Some more Craft room

Good Morning!

Hope everyone is having a great week! The weather has been bee-u-ti-ful here. It could stay this way till May and then get nice again. I wouldn't mind. Really.

Amy is still not feeling the greatest but I believe she is on the mend. Last nights lack of sleep probably isn't going to help much. Her dog Kallie got sick all over her bed at 3 this morning. She brought her in to me to watch while she was changing the bedding and poor Kallie then got sick again..... on my arm. Nothing like warm vomit to wake you up! At least it wasn't on the bed, I only have one pair of sheets until my new set arrives this week sometime!

Here's a pic of the little sickie this morning. I don't think she's feeling quite up to par.



Today's tour of the craft room will begin with my scrapbooking paper storage. A couple of years ago when the girls started scrapping also, the paper requirements went through the roof and the previous storage solutions just weren't cutting it any more. I couldn't afford to buy a system that was already made since I was spending a small fortune on supplies, so I threw myself on Dan and begged him to design and build me something. The man will do practically anything if you give him the right incentive. Lucky for me I know what that incentive is! This is what he came up with.


I have slots for all the different colors of paper and then slots for patterned paper plus a few extra slots for things like pages in progress and kits that have been bought. The unit hangs on the wall above the tables.


When I was trying to decide what configuration I wanted to put the tables in I started with an L shape. We set the tables up and by the time we put the computer, printer and silhouette cutter on the table, I lost one entire table of work space. Not good if several are scrapping at the same time. I pondered on the situation for a while, and thought perhaps we should buy another table, they aren't terribly expensive and I could then put them in a U shape. After some measuring though, I decided that another table was going to be too deep and I would still lose too much work space. Pondering again brought me to the conclusion that I needed to throw myself on Dan once again and have him build a narrower hanging shelf/table. And it needed to match the tops of the other tables that he had put laminate on as the paper crap they cover them with peels off easily and looks bad after about a month. This turned out to be an easier fix than we anticipated. While at Lowes to buy supplies, he found a ready made counter with the right laminate in the damaged section and picked it up for a song. He then cut the back off of it so that it would be the depth I needed (17") and voila! I now have plenty of work space and the computer and printer are handy but not interfering in any way.


See that nice wood laminate flooring? That's all new. We previously had a light colored laminate in there that Dan had dribbled and dropped super glue and enviro tex all over when he was using the room for his business. I tried for 3 hours to clean a little 3 x 3 inch spot on the old floor before I gave up and said we needed to install a new floor. This floor, while it looks nice, is very, very, very, cheap. If I was the only one that was going to be down there it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm not. The other night Abby was down there scrapping and she called me down to consult on a page she was doing and proceeded to push herself off of one table and roll over to the other table. Then she did it again in the other direction! This is so much fun mom! You should try it! Now I'm sure it's fun to do, but it's hard on the floor and I can already see scratches on it. I'm going to need a rug or something to protect it from a 21 year old daughter who sometimes acts like she's a 5 yr. old !

This is getting long again so I'm going to stop with the tour, give you a couple of cross stitch pictures and call it good.

Here is the November Cup O' Tea from Just Another Button Company. I still need to add the buttons though.


and my Chatalaine as of last night. Sorry the pic isn't very good but I didn't want to take it off the q-snaps as I plan to stitch on it today.


I need to get moving now. I want to decide what I'm taking to retreat and make a grocery list so I can get the food I will need for this weekend also. Have a great day everyone and thanks for stopping in and commenting!!

What to take to a stitching weekend and more craft room.

Thursday the 17th, I will be leaving for a few days to go to the shack and pack it up as we sign the papers on Friday. But after that bit of sadness I will be heading up the street to stay at this bed and breakfast. I will be met there by 8 other ladies for a weekend of stitching! I arranged this weekend in July when I was in Stuart for the 4th and before I knew the shack would sell. I mean really, who would buy my little piece of crap house?
I probably would have chosen a different date for the stitching if I had known. It will be a bittersweet weekend for me. I have a small problem with a stitching weekend though. Never having done anything like that before, I don't know what to take. Do I start something new? Take an old WIP? Something that requires a lot of concentration or something easy? My chatelaine or those annoying 12 dancing princesses? Or do I take it all? I have no idea. What have you done in the past for stitching weekends? I don't want to get up there and then not have the right stuff!

Time for another craft room installment. I showed you how I stored my DMC floss last time so I will continue the tour by showing you my fabric storage. Right now I have my fabric stored in the plastic bin on the right which sits under my DMC cabinets.



Fabric should not be folded. It can be very hard to get the crease out of fabric that has been folded in the same way for long periods of time. I know myself well enough to know that I won't re-fold it in a different way on a regular basis. I needed a new way to store my stash if I didn't want to keep it in a drawer folded in the same way year and year so I asked people on the 123 board about how they stored their fabric. There were a lot of great ideas but none of them were really what I was looking for, or they wouldn't work in my space. Ideally, fabric if it's not laid flat, or hung up full length should be rolled. I knew I didn't have a place to hang it, or to lay it out completely flat as that takes up too much space. This left me with rolling it. Which is all well and good as long as you don't over time smash the rolls down. I couldn't say for sure that smashing would never happen at my house so I needed to come up with a way to keep the rolls smash proof. Cardboard tubes don't work because they are full of acid, so after tossing around ideas, I decided to go with pvc pipe. I had Dan cut the pipe to specific sizes and then seal it as there is printing on it and although I don't think it would rub off I couldn't be sure. Then I used acid free tissue and rolled the individual pieces up on the pipe and pinned them with stainless steel pins. Stainless steel doesn't rust over time. This is how it looks.



Each drawer has a different count of fabric in it and each roll is labeled as to what it is, the size and if it is for a specific project, what that project is. It's very easy to see what I have and there are no creases. The hardest part of this process was finding an inexpensive bin with drawers wide enough for my fabric pieces. To be honest, I'm not happy with the one I bought because my larger pieces of fabric won't fit in the drawers without being folded. But for now this was only $13.00 which was the deciding factor in my mind. I'll have to watch Craigslist for another dresser, this time with long drawers. Alternatively, I can have Dan build me a piece to my specifications which is probably what will happen.

Amy has been sick since Friday. We are thinking it's just a cold or sinus infection as she has no fever, body aches, or chills. Right now she's behind me on the sofa, snoring loudly despite having told me not 15 minutes ago that she wasn't tired. Yeah, right! Snore away sleeping beauty, tomorrow is a school day!

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful weekend. Thanks for stopping in and commenting. A big Welcome to the new followers! And thanks again for the wonderful compliments on the room and the suggestions for the over dyed threads. I have a couple of ways of storing them that I am pondering, I'll let you know when I get it figured out!