Quilt Designers Blog Studio Tour

WELCOME TO MY STUDIO AND THE QUILT DESIGNERS' BLOG STUDIO TOUR!

My daughter and I moved into our house just over a year ago. I bought the land and built a house , NOT with my own hands, but I did have a hand in designing it. It's a small house on a steep block of land in a rural setting. My most important criteria was that I have a studio in the house and it needed to be a big room. When I showed the plans to the floor covering people, the woman said, "I like the way the largest room in the house is the studio!" Most of the house is carpeted, including my studio which I don't feel is ideal but does keep the continuity.
I am going to write a series of posts about different aspects of my studio. This first post takes a look at the walls and general area. The next are specifically about storage- large and small - and finally I'll show you things I like that might be of interest.
My studio is approximately 16 metres square, being 4m x 4.1m. It is south- east facing with a big window and door in that wall so it gets plenty of natural light and looks out on a grassy hillside slowly being encroached on by other houses. My sewing machine usually sits on the work table near the window. Sometimes I have another machine set up on my large English Oak Jacobean dining in the centre of the room too.

I use this table for classes and storing all sorts of things, cutting and doing my computer work. It's not ideal and takes up a lot of room but it is useful. I don't have a dining room and the table is an heirloom... actually it was my daughter's idea to use in my studio. In the photo above, you can See a pile of Billums from PNG waiting to be photographed and put in my online store. have a design wall all along one wall. I made this by buying 4 metres of cotton wadding and nailing it with thumb tacks to just below the cornice. I sporadically tacked other parts to the wall (Hey, it's my house after all!) but had to takes these out as my girl cat, Dolly, found them irresistible and was constantly running up and down the wall to play with the tacks. But the wall works well and there's plenty of room to put up projects.

Below is a section of shelving I arranged after I had the studio fitted out with shelves on another wall where I have a cupboard too. I used to have three old bookshelves and stacks of plastic crates. I like this area, below, because all my books and magazines can be stored there on the shelves, my business things fit onto the desk top and Cd's and small things tuck into the cement block recesses. In the space under the desk, I store my lesson and workshop plans in a plastic crate and my computer goes here when I have a class and need the table. You can also see just a bit of a cabinet displaying my vintage teddy bear collection...that has to go, but I'm sort of attached to the bears!
Pop back again in a couple of days for the next post. Thanks for reading.