Session 5: Finishing Touches

Well, you did it. The walls are painted, the carpet's in, the flooring is in whatever you chose, and the furniture's in but oh my gosh, we still have to move in all of our stuff. And oh, those walls look a little bare. So whether you just simply put on a fresh coat of paint and rearranged the furniture, or whether you did a full-scale make-over, it's time for the fun part. We need to play.

We need to add in the finishing touches to give our room some personality. Accessorizing your studio brings it to life and truly makes it your own. And the number one rule is what makes you happy. If it doesn't make you happy, don't put it in. What makes you happy?

That's the accessories you want to add. Artwork is always wonderful. Pick your favorites. Is it flowers? Is it pictures that you took on a vacation?

Is it abstract paintings? Perhaps it's samples of your work especially if you're a professional quilter. You want to have some samples up there. Maybe it's family photos and mementos, plants. Plants have a lot of life if the light is right.

So those are all the kinds of things that you can accessorize with. You also need to think about, having to clean your accessories and how much clutter will it be. There's a fine balance between looking interesting and looking junky. You've got a nice studio. Let's not junk it up.

So choose your accessories with care. Less is truly more when it comes to accessorizing. Plus, you're going to have a lot of sewing items that are gonna be in the room. They can also do double duty as your accessories. Now is the time to start thinking about medium and small storage.

And storage can actually be an accessory. If you look behind me at our set, you can see that baskets are used very effectively as accessories, but they also hold a lot of items from the fat quarters, to magazines, to books, to fabric, to threads. Baskets are wonderful. As are jars. Jars are great for your threads.

They're great for bobbins. They're good for buttons. Think out of the box, what can you use? The key for accessories or rather for storage, is to group like items together. When you're storing things group like things together.

This is what all designers tell you to do. Especially if you talk to kitchen planners like all the silverware goes together, in another space all of your cooking utensils go together. All of your dishes, group like items together. The other key rule in organizing, is to group by point of use. What I mean is if you're near the cutting table, that's where you need the rotary cutter, the rulers, probably the fabrics.

Group it by point of use. At the sewing machine, you need scissors, you need thread, you need bobbins. You need needles. That's where those should be stored. When it comes to scissors my tip is, more is better.

I'm always looking for scissors. I don't wanna have to walk across the room especially my snips to get a pair of snips. I have a pair of snips at my long arm, at each sewing table, at my serger. I don't want to have to keep looking. So you may need to duplicate some of your supplies to make it more efficient.

You are going to need to consider storage for thread, needles, bobbins, pins, notions, patterns, magazines and especially works in progress or UFOs, Unfinished Objects. We need to make sure we have places to store those. So when it comes to those items, you need to ask yourself, do I want to store them out of sight? Or do I want to visibly see everything? How much clutter can I deal with?

Do I want to see a lot of boxes and bins and plastic containers? Do I want to see a lot of stuff on my shelves? How hard is it going to be to clean this? We don't want a lot of dust and dirt getting on, especially our projects. So they probably need to be in some kind of bins or bags or whatever.

Ask yourself as you're looking, do you like the containers? I have found so many people and myself included, the one other thing that drives us absolutely nuts in our sewing area, that we really don't like, are the containers. Those baskets look ugly. Those are so old. Those clear plastic shoe boxes.

They're just . So if you don't like the container, get rid of it and find something else. And that may be something to do over time, because containers can be expensive, spread it out and pick and choose as you go. A great place for finding things are at thrift shops. You may find some wonderful finds at the thrift shop.

And that's a suggestion that I highly recommend. Now putting all of that together, I want to show you a few photos in the book. To some people this would look absolutely wonderful and charming. And it is, because she's used a variety of old tins, baskets with a lot of texture. Lunchbox, which I thought was pretty clever.

And this old Coca-Cola crate is wonderful for storing all of her supplies, her bias binding, her glue, her scissors. She's got her buttons in jars. This is a very fun setup that has a lot of personality. To other people, it might look a little cluttered. So again, it's back to your comfort level.

And other people would say, "there's no way I wanna dust all of that." But I thought this was some interesting use of storage items. I'm only gonna show you a couple of these that I thought were very interesting. I thought the use of the bath or the plastic containers on the shelves here were very good. I thought this was an interesting way to store some patterns by putting them on a line with closed pins. You can see that they've stored a lot of their long arm threads near the machine.

Underneath they put a cabinet with threads right by the long arm. So again, it's looking out for your particular way of storing things and thinking out of the box. I got a lot of ideas when I was working at Quilter's newsletter. This was part of our sewing center where we would go to make the props and things for the magazine. And they had these wonderful wire bins that were underneath the cutting table, which was a fabulous place to have all your fat quarters right under your table, and you could reach right in and get what you wanted.

I really like that. I also thought that, this wicker was a very nice shelving unit. And in it, she put, the plastic tubs that were labeled with the different fat quarters that came in from manufacturers for each month, so that we would know which ones to feature, sooner than others. And then for the tools we used pegboard and hung all the tools up the rotary cutters, the rulers, odds and ends. It was just a great system.

And I gained a lot of good ideas from that which you're gonna see when I take you on my tour. So, look through these different magazines, get some ideas and be creative with your storage. But again, I'm gonna remind you, and I'm gonna take Nancy Zieman's quote. "Discard it if you haven't used it in the last five years." To paraphrase her, if you really don't need it, if you really don't like it, don't put it back in the sewing room. You worked so hard to take everything out.

Think twice before you put it back in.