My Work Space IV

This week I'm going to tackle the (now clean) third wall of my new Craft Room. This will be the last segment in  my work space series. FYI the fourth wall that I'm not documenting is just an ancient couch I have up against the windows. The windows and couch pretty much take up all useful space there.

This is what I'm going to tell you guys about this week:

This space is opposite the storage units I described in Part II of My Work Space series. Try and ignore the coloring clutter from my Kindergartener which you can see on the corner of my workbench there (I will also not be photographing and showing my workbench; as the largest flat surface in the house I don't think it's been clean since we brought it in the house. =P) Following the left to right pattern I've been using to go through this room, I'm going to start with the drawer towers on the left hand side of the wall.

The white tower of drawers was an excellent find at Ikea and also happen to perfectly match the drawers on my art desk, which you can see more closely in my last work space blog post. What really drew me to this unit is that the drawers are fairly shallow. I use these to store a myriad of craft supplies ranging from paper crafts to polymer clay to quilting supplies to jewelry and accessory cosplay supplies. I like that the drawers are shallow because 1) I can't store too much in them which means 2) the drawers can't become as over-cluttered as I'm prone to letting things become thereby making it so that 3) I can find the supplies or tools I need when I actually need them (as opposed to two months later when I no longer need them but need something else instead). The stacking paper organizer on top of the left tower currently holds important papers (like reservation print-outs for conventions later this year) and some patterns, mostly print-outs and small (thin) books. Eventually these will be filed in the black filing cabinet to the right. The large stack of plastic containers on top of the right tower is my collection of DMC thread. Most of this was handed down to me from my Mom; it is in need of sorting since I still haven't mixed my thread in with what my Mom gave me, and on top of that, several of the containers got dumped out by my youngest boy (2.5 years old at the time--he's 5 now, so yeah, that was a while ago). XD The black filing cabinet next to the towers is the newest addition to the room. I was a little sad I couldn't find anything practical in white, since pretty much all the other furniture in the room is white. All things considered, you can't have everything, and that's really a small detail. Each long drawer contains two sets of bars for hanging files. I plan on using one drawer for tracking business related papers like receipts, travel info, and all that boring but important stuff. The other drawer I plan on using for all my sewing patterns--I am hoping I can fit this in just half of it. The other half I want to use for other patterns--crochet, knit and cross stitch mostly that I print offline or have put together myself or are books that are just too thin to put on a bookshelf.

Next up we have the cabinets, counter, and shelves I recycled from my last two attempts at putting together a Craft Room. When I first got these, the shelves and counter were longer, and the cabinet units were spaced to fit a stool between each one. This was where I used to keep my sewing machine and laptop (or at least where they were supposed to live; practically it didn't work very well having them there). When I moved this furniture into the rental house we lived in last year, the counter and shelves were shortened to fit in the space I had for them and the cabinet unit on the far left was turned perpendicular to the 2nd cabinet unit leaving only one gap between the cabinets. When we moved everything into my new craft room, I originally set things up the way I had then (you can see what the set up looked like in this post--the picture is at the very bottom). With the addition of the filing cabinet, having the one cabinet turned became impractical since the filing cabinet made it hard to open the cabinet doors. Since I wasn't trying to fit a stool between any of the cabinets we decided to simply turn all the cabinets facing forward, put them next to each other, and leave just a small space on the right end. Ostensibly the space was there so I could access the electrical outlet there, but it's also turned into a nice little nook for storing my little ironing board and my larger cross stitch frames. Right now the cabinets themselves just hold shipping supplies for my Etsy shop and a few other odds and ends. All that I currently have on the counter is my paper-cutter and lamination machine which I use to make my badges and bookmarks. So far the counter is mostly clean--here's hoping it can stay that way. I have my doubts.

 The shelves above the cabinet primarily hold display and inventory for my Artist Alley table (and Etsy shop =P). Starting on the top shelf, I have my panda collection and the three bins holding my badge inventory. On the middle shelf, I have what's left of my ready-to-ship tarot card decks, bins of mistakes (items that have either not laminated properly, have typos or otherwise have something wrong with them and I need to eventually list as clearance items but haven't done anything with yet), bin with my adhesive collection, box of bookmarks, and box of tarot card decks that are not ready to ship (I need to sit down and make more of the little books to go with them). The bottom shelf holds my table display stuff, what's left of the Anime RPG books, my print inventory, and my husband's chain mail jewelry supplies.

So that's pretty much it for my new Craft Room. I love my space. I hope to get to use it more in the near future; it's kind of sad that I have this space now and haven't been able to use it really since I got it. =P I'm sure that will change though as we start settling down into more of a routine here in the new house with the new baby and the new school schedule and curriculum.

My Work Space III

It's time for the third installment in the post series on my new craft room. Today, I'm going to show you the two places where I spend most of my work time.

If you stand near the window in my craft room and look back toward the door heading out to the hallway, you will see two desks. Right now there's a lot of open wall space in this part of the room. I plan on putting up at least one bulletin board for posting ideas, reference pictures, and things like that. I also plan on putting up some art and decorations--like the really awesome panda bamboo wall scroll that my Mom got me for my birthday last week. =)

Let's start with the smaller one on the left. This is my sewing table. It is a place where I can leave my sewing machine out (permanently). On the left part of the desk, I have my thread rack. I would like to eventually have this actually hanging on the wall instead of just propped up next to it. Then, of course, is my sewing machine. Maybe one of these days I'll get a really nice machine that can do embroidery or something cool like that, but in the mean time, I'll take my el-cheapo machine from Walmart. It's lasted about 4 years now, so I can't complain too much. Just for reference, this is my third sewing machine since I started sewing--well saying all 3 were "mine" is stretching it a little. Technically the first machine belonged to my Mom. I broke that one making my oldest son's Artemis (Sailor Moon) costume. It didn't really like the faux fur. XD Anyways... next to the sewing machine is my Sailor Venus plushie that my best friend brought me back from the Japan area in San Fransisco. Sailor Venus is one of my favorite scouts--surprisingly it's because I have a thing for orange (not that you could tell or anything, but really orange doesn't sound like it'd go so well with Gothic Panda, so that's why there's purple all over everything, which is fine because I like purple too--yay for run-on ramblings). The drawers on the right end of the desk hold sewing supplies like cloth measuring tapes, extra needles for the sewing machine, various presser feet, scissors, and extra bobbins. Right now, I have references for the Soul Eater costume set taped up on the wall since I don't have the bulletin board to put up there yet.

The desk to the right of the door is my art space. Starting on the left, the drawer unit holds some paint, all my markers and colored pencils, as well as basic supplies like pencils, inking pens and erasers. My old flatbed scanner currently sits on top of those drawers. Moving on is a lamp that I don't think is even plugged in yet. Theoretically it's there for extra light in case I want to be up late at night drawing. It's entirely likely that I will put it to use at some point since most of my free time for art does come late at night--right now my schedule is a little wonky because of having a one-month old, but that will change (that's the thing with kids... they grow... fast). The area on the table in front of the lamp is supposed to be clear so that I have a clean flat surface to draw on since I still do all of my art with a pencil, at least initially. I still haven't gotten the hang of drawing on the computer from scratch. Maybe one of these days... In the mean time... I have a space to draw. In any case, I am planning to actually branch out and do a little bit more traditional art--mostly marker and colored pencil, but I'd like to play with some of my watercolors some more. =) Next to the lamp are the two chocobos my husband got me for my birthday last year. <3 Then, there's my laptop, which I currently have a love-hate relationship with. It's almost brand new, and it was supposed to replace my old laptop since the old one was having processor issues and was prone to crash, and even when it worked it would take a while to do anything (imagine having to wait 10+ minutes for an art file to simply open). The problem is that it has Windows 7 operating system, which is not compatible with most of the software I use. Fail. >_< We have a temporary fix for Photoshop that sort of works--my husband rigged the program to pretend I had Windows XP when I open that program. The tablet behaves with it now, and it doesn't crash quite as often as it was before. Still... it's annoying. I guess half the real problem is that I never update with the times. I'm content to stick with what I've been using, especially if it works; my version of Photoshop is about 8 years old, and it's done what I've wanted to up until now. Anyways... moving on. In front of my laptop is my Wacom tablet--probably the most awesome piece of technology I've invested in... well maybe 2nd most awesome. The most awesome would be the Wacom tablet I had before this one, but the wires in the cable for that one became frayed, which posed a problem since I work at a laptop and I tend to move it around the house based on where munchkins are--I could get the tablet to work, but it took a lot of delicate playing with the wire to do so. I ended up giving it to a friend who uses a desktop; she was able to finagle the cord to a position where it worked, and then she taped it down to her desk. =P (She does awesome stuff btw; you should check out her DeviantArt.) You know, I should probably not be writing right now; I'm sleepy, which means my writing is going to be incoherent and rambling. Ah well, at least this post will come out on the day it's supposed to this way, even if it would be a little more concise if I'd waited until tomorrow morning. =P Anyways, finally, on the right end of the desk, next to my laptop, is my new printer. Originally my flatbed scanner lived there. In theory, this particular printer can scan as well, although I haven't tried it yet. This was a purchase I'd been wanting to make for a little while now; being that I live in the middle of nowhere, it's about a 30 minute drive to get to the nearest office supply store where I can get my art printed at. That's a lot of time, gas, and wear and tear on my car every time I need to print something. Now I can print from home. This also I haven't actually made much use of beyond testing yet. XD I blame life circumstances that have prevented me from doing much of anything art related over the last month or so. =P I'd kind of like to put another bulletin board up above this desk as well to pin ideas and sketches for new art so I don't lose them. Also, underneath the printer are some drawers. Here I store paper, old sketchbooks, and other odd art-related, mostly paper-sized things.

Like the storage units I wrote about last week both of these desks came from Ikea. I think it was awesome how they were just the right sizes to fit one on each side of the door. So far, they've made great work spaces. These two spaces were two things I really wanted for this craft room since sewing and drawing are the two things I spend the most time doing. This way I have places where I can leave my sewing machine and computer, tablet and scanner/printer set up and still have space to work on other odd projects. I still have my big work table in the middle of the room, which I can use to cut out fabric for costumes (since I don't have to keep the sewing machine and stuff spread out there) or scrapbook or lay out quilts or whatever I want. I think the only thing that would make all this  more awesome (I am really excited to have this space) would be if I had more geeky crafty girl friends who lived near enough to me so we could have craft parties and share this space with--it's always more fun working with other people. I did have a mini-craft-party during our last D&D game. Three of us came upstairs with a laptop, which we connected via Skype (or some other similar program) to another laptop downstairs at the kitchen table where the rest of the group was playing, so we still participated in the game while working on cosplays and plushies. XD

My Work Space II

When I attempted to restart my blog last May, I started posting about my new craft room. I meant to spend the Fridays in May posting about this. Obviously that didn't happen, but picking up where I left off, I will be writing on my work space today, since it's Friday. =)

I love my work space, and here is one big reason why. When you walk in to my craft room and look to the wall on the right, I have two large storage units. There are three drawers at the bottom of each unit. The left unit drawers contains all of my scrap fabric neatly folded and relatively accessible, especially when compared to previous methods of storing scrap fabric. Those methods have ranged from large garbage bags to gigantic plastic bins. The older systems were cumbersome and finding a specific piece of fabric was a challenge, not to mention both systems were messy--fabric wouldn't usually stay folded. With the drawers, folded pieces of fabric are at most 2 layers deep, so I don't have to do a lot of digging to find things. On the right unit, the drawers contain all my yarn; the bottom drawer is a little messy because one of my cats has discovered how to open it, and at night, he likes to select a "kill" and deposit the dead yarn ball at the door to my bedroom, usually along with 1-2 socks (singles, not matches) and an odd pair of underwear pilfered from one of the kids' laundry baskets. My goal over the next year is to use enough of that yarn to reduce it to 1 drawer, and then I'd like to use the other 2 drawers for more scrap fabric--I still have 2 buckets of scrap fabric that needs to be sorted, folded and put away.

Above the drawers, in both units, are four shelves. These shelves contain my in-progress project buckets and odd costume accessories. The project buckets were an idea I started about 10 years ago, although it's only been in the last 2 years that I've actually started using it effectively. Each bucket contains all the materials for one project, whether it's a costume, a quilt, an afghan or whatever. This way, when I want to work on something, all I need to do is pull out the bucket for a project, work on it, and then when I'm finished working, I put all materials and progress back in the bucket and return it to the shelf. When the system works, it means I spend less time looking for things or trying to remember where I left patterns (or zippers, or any other small thing that I could easily misplace). There are a few projects sitting loose on the shelves, mainly because I ran out of my project buckets--maybe it's a sign I need to go back and finish a few things--although there is one project that would not fit in one of the smaller buckets.

In between the shelves, I installed a closet bar. Here I have hung up all of my finished, or mostly finished, costumes that I plan on wearing in the near future. I would need considerably more space to store all of my completed costumes from the last 12 years. I've also hung up some of my favorites from my collection of kids cosplays--like Logan's Edward Elric costume that he wore when he was 3 and Ty's Vash the Stampede costume which he wore at 3 as well. In the collection of cosplays that I have kept out are both of my Ragnarok Online costumes (priestess and high priestess), my husband's Ragnarok Online high wizard costume, my husband's Link my Zelda, my White Mage robe, my Fluttershy and our Mai and Zuko A:tLA costumes. There are a few others hanging up there, but that's most of them. Believe it or not, I have two enormous buckets of costumes packed up in the garage. XD I should probably get rid of some of them, but I have a hard time letting go of things like that.

I got both of these storage units from the closet section at Ikea. The biggest challenge to installing these units was the fact that I left the back off of them; I wanted the purple on my walls to show through where the back would show. This made the units slightly unstable. After trying several things to stabalize them we ended up just nailing them into the wall, and even that took several tries because of how the units were built and where the wall studs were. In the end though, it worked out, and I am exceptionally happy with how they came out.

My Work Space I

One of the great perks of our new house is my upstairs craft room. I will be spending the next couple of Fridays sharing what I've done with the room. I enjoyed looking through other places seeing what others had done with their spaces, so I see this as returning the favor. Deciding how to put my room together presented several challenges, the largest of which is the fact that I don't just make costumes or just draw or just do any one thing. I enjoy playing with all kinds of different crafts and over the last 12 years or so, I've collected a lot materials, tools and other supplies. My goal was to find a home for everything--all the tools, all the scrap materials and extra yarn, and so on--as well as have space to work. In the house we sold back in November, I had a craft room (sort of--it never got completely unpacked and functional). There I had installed a countertop on some cabinets with some shelves, and then I had purchased an 8 ft. folding table to use as a work bench. I salvaged most of those supplies. We had cut down the countertop a little to fit it in the rental house we had for about a year--we had a rent with option to purchase contract on that house and had intended to purchase it as soon as our old house sold. For a variety of reasons, not buying that house has turned out to be a very good thing for us in ways we could not have foreseen, but that's a post for another time (or maybe not at all since it really doesn't have a lot to do with my art which is really what this blog is supposed to be about). In any case, I still had shelves, the countertop and cabinets and the work bench. There were things that were not so good about that system of organization that I discovered over the years using it. For example the sewing machine had a spot on the counter with a space between the cabinets where I could theoretically sit at a stool and sew. What was wrong with that? Well, I neglected to consider that the foot controller thing wouldn't reach to the floor from the height of the counter. That made sewing difficult. Then the work bench was supposed to stay mostly clean and available for cutting out fabric or whatever else I needed to work on. That never happened either. That table ended up becoming the catch-all spot for everything in the room. The sewing machine ended up there; the computer, scanner and tablet also found homes there. Really it became generally useless over time because of the amount of stuff that accumulated on the table that had no other real functional home.

My goal with this room was to avoid some of those problems. So, how did I go about doing this? Well, first of all, I tried to make a comprehensive list of all the craft projects I might work on up here. Then I looked at things that could be grouped together. For example, costume projects and quilting projects use a lot of the same basic supplies. Also, scrapbooking, stamping, and other paper crafts could share some of the same space since they too use a lot of the same basic supplies. I would want space to store all of the supplies and tools for each type of project together--one of the other big problems I've had in past attempts at creating craft rooms is that nothing ever got entirely unpacked or organized which meant I could not find things. Next I considered the fact that my sewing machine and computer/scanner/tablet/drawing paper are the two things I spend the most time working with. I wanted to have two permanent work stations where I could leave those things set up that did not involve the big work bench.

While pondering how to organize my room, the first thing we did was paint the room. When we bought the house, this room was painted a bright kelly green. Although this isn't necessarily a bad color, and I know it appeals to a lot of people, it is not a color suited to my tastes. I had originally planned on painting the room a light purple and then adding a darker purple texture to it, but after spending some time in this house, I decided that I needed to reverse those color choices--using a dark purple base and adding a lighter purple texture to that. The rooms in this house are painted with a lot of dark saturated colors and the pastel base in this room just didn't feel right here. So, we took a weekend to prime, paint, and sponge the room. My husband helped a lot here--since I wasn't supposed to be spending large quantities of time inhaling paint fumes; that would have been bad for baby. I did some work, but kept it limited, so my husband deserves most of the credit for the paint job here. =) Below are some "before" and "after" pictures of the paint in this room. Something else we added was an overhead light with fan since this room didn't have anything for lighting.

The pictures aren't great. The first one is this room with my workbench and still green. You can also see the old couch I've kept in my last 2 craft areas. I was determined I'd find a home for it here too. In the second picture, you can see my husband touching up some of the paint around the door, and the overhead light has been installed. I meant to get a picture of the room after we'd put the dark purple base down, but I forgot. The third picture is an up close of the walls with the sponge texture. The last picture is of the old countertop, cabinets and shelves from the previous craft areas. Sadly this was the only piece of the room that I remembered to photograph before putting stuff on it. XD Next week, I'll post more on what I actually did to organize this room.