So it has been a long, busy summer with lots of travelling, camping, and not a lot of sewing. So not much quilty to blog about. But my daughter started back at school yesterday, and my son starts tomorrow, so there is some peace and routine on the horizon!

My guild is doing a series of blog posts where people show their sewing space. I signed up for August, but then my to do list got overwhelming and I traded with someone in mid-September. I figured doing this post was the perfect excuse to finally admit that this is way more than just a hobby and get my space in order. I am, after all, spending hours a day at this and I do deserve an orderly, efficient workspace.

In February, I was lucky enough to attend a scrap management workshop with Amanda Jean Nyberg (crazy mom quilts), who is also a member of our guild. I spent the majority of the workshop just sorting through years of scraps, and put them all into six paper bags by color. I did black/gray, white/cream, pink/purple, red/orange/yellow/brown, green, and blue. I also wound up with two bags of just misc. scraps like bags of triangles left from making snowball blocks.

Right after the workshop, life got messed up for a bit and the bags got shoved into the back of the linen closet and forgotten.

I decided that either my new sewing space was going to have to have a scrap management plan, or I needed to just get rid of them all. I am way too frugal to get rid of what must be pounds of scraps, so I thought about what to do for quite awhile. I love Amanda Jean’s scrap bins, but I just don’t have enough space on the main floor for that many bins that won’t stack, nor, to be honest, do I have the time and patience to make them all.

Then in August at the MQ meetings, the speaker was Lois Hallock, author of Creating your Perfect Sewing Space. I got a number of tips from her two talks, but one that struck me that I could do right away was to store your scraps where you cut your fabric. At that point, I was doing all of my cutting on my dining room table, which meant that it was always full of fabric and other quilting debris. I decided to get a dedicated cutting table and put it right near my sewing table.

I finally chose one from Ikea (a Groland kitchen island), stained it dark, and cut down the legs a couple of inches. Underneath all my scraps fit acceptably well, and they should fit better after I sew through some of them. In particular, that bin underneath is full of triangles, jellyrolled slabs, and orphan blocks that will all be incorporated into backings shortly. I should be able to get through a bunch this winter and now that they are right near my machine, I can actually grab a bin and start sewing. The chance of me grabbing a bag out of the upstairs linen closet and doing anything with it was running about zero, so this is a massive improvement. Plus, they look kind of pretty now!

I’ll be posting more bits and pieces of my sewing space as I finish them up and get closer to that mid-September deadline!