Mar 7, 2011

Work In Progress, Plus How You Fit a Sewing "Room" Into a 1-bedroom Apartment With Three Residents

If you're wondering how to fit a sewing room into a one-bedroom apartment that you share with a grown man and a toddler (the only one among us who gets her own room, lucky bastard), here's how you do it: in between the bike-parking area, the stroller holding pen, about five feet from the front door, the kitchen, and just about everything else. In short: it's a good thing my child can be trusted with pins and scissors.

I consider this photo at left a public service announcement to all those people who are made to feel badly by looking at the lovely homes owned by curated by other bloggers. (You know who you are.) My boogers are full of teeny little fibers that float around my apartment because my sewing space is located in our home's central nervous system. When my child runs back and forth in her fancy shoes with her best friend "Camila" (a real friend who is also an imaginary friend she plays with when the actual Camila has better things to do than gallop back and forth across our apartment), she stops just short of my sewing machine pedal. When my husband needs to ask me where the butter is, I can point to it with my free hand. My family is very, very lucky I am long on patience.


And yet I will manage to find room somehow for new things like my Brother serger pictured above. I just bought it from Amazon.com after a depressing experience trying to buy one used from Craigslist. I love it and wish I had bought one years ago. It's saving me lots of time already (and patience, which I can instead dispense to my family constantly underfoot).

For example, this peachy silk blouse I am working on (pictured in pieces at right here) — I can use the serger to make gathers lickety split, finish seams and hopefully (if I can figure it out) make rolled hems. fancy! This is the blouse I'll be making with the same pattern from my last top and to go with the navy and peach skirt you can see on my dressform here.

I have some cooking to do now (darn family, always needing to eat food) so it's time for a break.

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So I realized I never actually addressed HOW you fit a sewing room into a one-bedroom apartment in this post (as the title suggests I should).  Here's my addition:

In point form:

-Shelves. Lots of them. But be careful not to kill yourself or your partner mounting them. IKEA shelving should come with complimentary marriage counselling.
-Hooks. Lots and lots of them. Get everything up on the wall, but within reach. I string things between hooks, hanging pattern pieces from the cord.
-I stand while I sew, with my machines on my drafting table. Otherwise I would need two tables of different heights. Not gonna happen unless we start eating our dinner off our bellies like cute little otters.
-Just give up on the idea that you will ever have a tidy and cute home like you did back when you had two bedrooms all to yourself in Winnipeg (and for less than half the rent we pay for one bedroom in NYC). I digress.

1 comment:

  1. I happened upon your blog and have been reading your archives and I'm delurking here to say, 1. You're hilarious--love your sense of humor and writing. 2. I adore your sewing and am in awe of you and others who actually draft your own patterns! 3 THANK YOU for showing a sewing "room" (such as it is, for you) as I am betting most of them actually look. Spending anytime at all in the house & home section of the blogosphere starts giving me a complex....my sewing room looks like a tornado just blew threw it most of the time, and I even have a semi-dedicated guest-sewing room combo. 4. Your daughter is adorable, and I have a little boy the same age so I sympathize with you on the preschool quirks :)

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