It's a relief to be free of "Stuff"

If you will recall from a previous post, or my tweets over the past few days, I have just spent 5 days sorting through all the "stuff" that accumulated in my sewing room. I had felt like I was trapped by it, it was all closing in on me. It was oppressive. I threw some out, sent some away, gave some to charity, organised and categorised, found a place for it all, but it was hard. I felt so often over the past 5 days an emotional connection to the "stuff"- so much of the fabric and patterns came from my Mum. But, I was able to force myself to get rid of much of the "stuff" that I really will never use, not in a million years. It is with some huge relief, (like a weight lifted off) that I can now take photos of my sewing room to share, the way that it is today without embarrassment.

Clear benchtop! Organised shelves with everything in a place of it's own...who's room is this..surely not mine.

My scissors and things I use often, still in reach but out of sight tucked neatly , on top of the filing cabinet underneath the table and contained within one sewing box on the table.

It's a bad photo, but my iPad is on the closed horn cabinet, in a heavy wrought iron plate holder from spotlight so I can watch/listen to the podcasts when I need to, without it getting lost under fabric on my bench. Older sewing machine is neatly away inside it's horn sewing cabinet, which is actually closed for a change! Mailing boxes stacked in the corner.

Futon, cleared and can actually be sat upon! Enormous recycled white picture frame is for a project I've been working on for ages. Now it's to be hung even while it's empty, to get it off the floor, as soon as husband gets time, or I do it myself, whichever comes first;) And hopefully the item to go in it will be finished soon too.

Terribly dark photo, but in centre of window I have hung my mums doily press. Her brother made it for her in the 3rd grade. I think it is too pretty to put away in the cupboard. It's made using a hot wire to burn a pattern into the timber, then stained in different colours on the flower petals. It was made in 1931.

Here is a closer photo of it, so you can better see the detail. It's a little bowed from being pressed around so many doilies over the years, and it's ties are odd. I vaguely remember when I was a small child, some dark leather strapping being in it instead of the ribbon and apron tie thats in it now!

See look at all that space on the bench to cut things out!

All my fabric is organised into categories and folded neatly to fit properly into each draw. I cut a piece of stiff plastic from and old folder divider into the exact size to fit the fabric into the draw height and width. Then I folded each piece of fabric to fit the plastic. It made it heaps easier than guessing the size for each fold. On top I have small and large scraps of fabric separated into 2 clear buckets ($2 each from sams warehouse) And baskets that might one day be useful again.

My unfinished objects and works in progress are all in individual bags in one box.

The mending and some pants that need shortening are in this flexible bucket from Bunnings. There's a lot to do in there.

I never thought I would get one of these, but I did. I bought a Dymo labeller from Officeworks. I went crazy with the labelling, but it helps SO much when organising, especially the drawers and containers.

On the weekend mid-cleanup, I left this Lil dude in a covering his eyes, sad, don't look pose...

My husband snuck in there and changed him to a...doing a jig pose! 

hehehe thanks for the giggle!

The sewing room I will always be a work in progress. I will always have to fight the urge to leave things out, or sort it later. I will always have to fight the tendency to start a new project before finishing the many that came before it. But at least, for today anyway, I can feel what it feels like to have a win.

So, I've come to confess and repent

So this morning I went into my sewing room, I tried to sew, but instead, I just looked at it.

I had a thousand excuses about keeping what i was using close by because I keep needing it. But really in all honesty, it's really quite difficult to work around such mess, not to mention, where the heck is that...comes out of my mouth quite often.

It is also counter-productive because it MAKES you feel like you don't really want to be in there, even when you really do want to be sewing.

and if it's really bad, like when heaps of things come from someone else's house, into yours, then your husband can't come in to sit and keep you company while you sew. (theres a futon under there)

And things start becoming unfinished objects, in multiple boxes, and tubs, and buckets, and shelves. I don't even know/remember whats really in there.

So, today is the day week. I'm not going to stop until it's all cleaned up and everything has a place, that's my goal.

Oh yeah! Oh yeah, we have shelves!

THE SHELVES ARE FINISHED!

Above is a view of 4 of the 5 rows of shelves, the 5th, (the bottom row) is not visible because I couldn't get it into the shot with the phone camera. Hehehe apparently 2 metres high is too much for it;)

Above the top photo is the left side of all 5 rows of the shelves. The other is the right side of all 5 rows of the shelves. Apparently 2 metres wide is also too much for it;)

I wish I could, but I can't get a better photo for two frustrating reasons. 1. the proper camera battery is failing to charge properly...grr! and 2. to get the shelves into their location, the whole sewing room had to be packed up into one area of the room, kinda like tetris, so I can't get far enough back in the room to get the whole shelves in properly with the phone camera.
Once I start unpacking stuff and filling the shelves I'll be able to get back far enough to take another shot.
I LOVE MY NEW SHELVES! I Love them so much I want to sit and stare at them for hours. Some of that love comes from how hard a battle it was to make them! (Isn't that the case with all projects.)

The WORST part about this whole shelf debacle was pulling it completely apart yesterday. Having made them so beautifully, and perfectly, we had to pull every bit apart to fit it into the room. Involved with that was unfortunately pulling out hundreds of nails, levering off the backing sheets of MDF (which couldn't be reused afterwards...grrr!), removing the fabric panels (most of them ripped and shredded while being removed couldn't be reused afterwards...more grrr!), unscrewing all the screws holding it together, and then pulling apart all the shelves off their dowel joins and removing the side panels and carrying everything in the room individually.

Today we reassembled the whole thing again! We had to buy all new backing sheets, this time ply instead of MDF (incase it ever needs to come apart again it can be reused) and we learnt this time to use double sided tape to hold the fabric in place to make the nailing in easy! Some of the fabric panels could not be reused from  the first incarnation and had to be replaced by different fabric colours. I now have small dots, large dots and stripes. The colours are aqua, lime green, orange, dark purple and royal blue. SQUEAL of Delight! All done with plenty of organising to do to fill it. :)

UNFINISHED OBJECT progress!
Nearly every family holiday that involved a long car trip, also involved some sort of craft. Long stitches, Cross-stitches, Knitting Nancy, Finger knitting, knotted friendship bracelets to name but a few. We'd work on them on the way there, fill in rainy days in the caravan with them, and work on them a bit on the way home in between naps. Inevitably these often caused us kids in the back of the car to develop car-sickness...it was rare that they ever got finished, because once back home they were soon forgotten. Mum would buy us another the next school holiday trip, repeat.

This one was from the 1993 July trip to Bateman's Bay. It was found with it's unused threads attached to a piece of cardboard with holes punched in it for each of the threads and hand drawn representations of the pattern codes (I was quite organised back then apparently). Mum found it in one of her knitting bags, in the top of her wardrobe, with a packet of mints and her own UFO, a blue baby jacket and booties she was knitting for my cousin- who turned out to be a girl! - that's how we know the approximate year of the cross stitch.
Last night I finished it off and did all it's back stitching. Now all I need to do is give it an iron (once I can un-tetris the sewing room and reach the iron) and stick it in a frame. We'll call it still in progress.

UNFINISHED OBJECT tick one off the list!
While the shelf debacle has kept me out of action in the sewing room, I finished my UFO Pink Fluffy Scarf!

It was started in Winter 2004. Now I am certainly no knitter. My mum knits extremely delicate intricate patterns really fast, me, I always forget how to start it, drop stitches, break needles, loose needles, somehow add on stitches and generally spend more time pulling it back and starting again, I never learnt to finish it (until today) and I can only knit PLAIN hehehe - it drove my mum spare trying to teach me and she tried hard to teach me purl. I just have a blockage or some kind of defective knitting gene.
However, today I am proud to have finished the scarf, plain and possibly slightly defective as it is..and I "cast off" all by myself...well, with the help of this Patons How to Knit tutorial. I don't think I will ever be a great knitter, but I have conquered it's basics, maybe I'll one day find the light going off and finally know how to knit one purl one.

CROCHET - I got hooked.
This evening, I even did a few tutorials in how to crochet. I made a whole long line of chain stitch on my new Crochet hook, I've never seen in person, or touched a crochet hook before. It's one of those things I've always wanted to learn. I'm quite impressed with myself really. It's been a busy day:)

Knitting to conceal the pain of I can't get to the sewing machine and we still have shelves in front of our TV.

So, I can't knit other than basic basic plain. I started a scarf...hmmm in 2004. It's pink and fluffy and makes me sneeze when I knit it. I found said scarf today in the linen cupboard (luckily not in the sewing room), to give me something to make while my lounge remains a construction/deconstruction site and the sewing room is in pieces and inaccessible..I can't even reach the sewing machine, but I can see it behind the Futon, just out of reach.
In our Lounge room sits the enormous beautiful storage shelves we made on the weekend and finished last night. If you can't see from the grainy camera phone pic, the fabric is Orange, Lilac, lime and blue with white spots and Orange, Lilac, lime and blue with white Stripes. I used two stripe panels of each colour one horizontal and one vertical and two each colour of the spots.

They looked exactly the way I wanted, just perfect! so perfect! Better than I hoped it would be.
However, how can something so perfect be so evil! They can not be encouraged into the spare room no matter what we do. After angling them five different ways from Sunday, the closest we came to actually thinking they might go in was when we  still needed an additional 1-2cm of bathroom doorway to swing the shelves around into the spare room doorway. They just wont go in! and a couple of tantrums later, we just went to bed defeated.
So, despite the fact I am typing this calmly, a moment ago I was heart breakingly pulling out nails with pliers in an attempt to deconstruct the shelves. They have to be completely pulled apart and moved into the sewing room piece by piece, then put back together again inside the room. It's a pity we did such a good job of it. The nails are really embedded and are really hard to jimmy out - and thats just the nails holding the MDF backing sheet on...the shelves are all dowel joins, once I get down to pulling those apart I believe I may cry!..Lord I just can't explain how depressing this feels to pull apart!
So here I am pulling out nails, knitting a row, pulling back a row or two to fix the knitting and silently wishing we'd just driven the 5 hrs to sydney Ikea.

Taa Daa...February sewing with Knit Challenge Completed! - and other progress.

I found some time to finish my top for My Favourite's 12 month's 12 sewing Challenges, February Sewing with Knit Fabric Challenge. I'm still not happy with it entirely, especially the missed stitching of the double needle that is continuing, but it is finished! I still love the colour of it, although it looks like Pyjamas (Thanks for saying that Husband...hehehe).

I loved the cuff in the pattern picture, but now I'm not so sure..it seems awfully large. If I were to make it again  I would certainly make these smaller.

I stitched on some buttons just above the split in the cuff. I found them in a button jar that came from my mum's house. They are clear plastic, but swirly, and they seem to pick up and dance with the colours of the top underneath...hard to see in photos though.

Progress on the March FOSAL Ornament - Pattern chosen :)
I've decided to stitch up a bauble using this free pattern from Better Homes and Gardens.
I have also decided to stitch it up in purples rather than the blue they are using in theirs. I am not starting it until March, but it is kitted up waiting until then. Forgive the photo, I took it with my phone camera, because the proper cameras battery is charging.

Progress on the Shelves and Sewing Room :)

Sewing room looks like a bomb hit it. (meh!) Lot's of sorting and shifting and moving going on.

The whiter than White brighter than Bright shelves are all painted blindingly reflective white and were at any minute going to be constructed. I came in for some air-con and water...not blogging hehehe...and as I was typing, Husband (out in the hot hot outdoors) let out some cursing...and now he is off to go buy or do something...I'm not sure I should ask what went wrong. I snuck out there to take a photo of the progress, only to have the warning, Battery Exhausted (that makes two, three of us!) come up. It is certainly a very large project. Progress Halted...albeit Temporarily.

OK It's now 9pm on a Sunday night and the construction phase got moved into our lounge room. I'm not too hopeful this project will have a conclusion tonight but I do not believe that we will be putting up with  construction in the lounge room for too long. 

Here are some phone camera pics of the construction phase.

Yes, we know theres a Christmas garland and Christmas Lights still up..they somehow got missed when we packed up everything else, and are now jokingly are being referred to as the Easter lights...(they'll be gone soon I promise.

It's so very very Large!

So that's as far as we got tonight. It's a giant white skeleton. Weekend is over and Husband is back to work tomorrow... At least it is at a stage where I can cut out the material for the back and attach it, if I don't get called into work tomorrow, and Husband can attach the backing sheets of MDF tomorrow evening. God knows how we are going to angle it into the tiny hallway and then into the Spare room! - I'm expecting tears...husband says it will be fine, but it's so very big!

I can't work in these conditions - and other tales I tell myself

Well, 8 days to go until I need to have my top finished and displayed, and my sewing room is in a shambles! Ridiculously (and excitedly) we've decided to re-organise and build shelves for the sewing room in the middle of a million different other things we both should be doing instead! But, I was soooo excited last night I could not sleep!
Basically the sewing room was intended to be a spare room for our friends to stay when they come visit and a place for me to sew in my spare time. However, I've spent a heck of a lot more time in there of late and I've noticed it becoming a disorganised, depressing place to be...hmm the junk room, tidy up later room, cables everywhere, can't see the TV comfortably at any angle, can't find a place for it put it in the spare room room. It's very hard to feel creative sitting up next to the vacuum cleaner and the boxes that came with every computer and appliance that is still in warranty (and some that aren't).
When I was at uni studying a Visual Art degree I wandered into a second hand furniture store and bought this big ol' dining table that I used to paint, pastel and draw on. Candle wax dripped on it, an iron fell over on it,  an old metal cased PC got scrapped across it, I stood on it to put up posters, ink spilt on it, it's legs wiggled out of their really well made dowel joins..it barely survived uni in far worse shape than I did! I've dragged this table with me across 3 different states and many different house and flat moves, It's been a computer desk, a dining table, an art desk, a place to study, a writing desk, a platform for a clothes dryer, A place to create wedding invitations, cards, cut out fabric, put piles of fabric on, a book shelf. It's done everything! I couldn't bare to part with it, because it's my table and we have history! This time it is going into my dad's shed, it just takes up too much space in the sewing room. We live in a rented 2 bedroom unit where every wall is a dirty cream coloured (renting so I can't paint it), we sleep in the smaller room (because it doesn't get as hot in summer or as noisy because it's at the back) and the other bigger, hotter room is my sewing room. I've attempted to organise it many many times, but there's just a severe lack of wardrobes, cupboards and shelves, everything ends back out on the table top, on the horn cabinet on the chair, in fact everywhere! I wish I were neater, I wish I were one of those people with a place for everything, but seriously, most of my stuff has never had a place. It entered the home on a whim shopping expedition and ended up somewhere until it got shifted, and shifted and shifted each time I needed to do something where it was. It comes down to, do I have time to tidy everything or do I have time to sew, this weekend I force myself to tidy because, this is the plan we want to make:

So, to make this happen, this weekend/week's agenda...

1. Build shelves and Paint shelves a nice fresh white
2. line the back of shelves with bright colours of fabric
3. Sort everything to free up space and see what we actually need
4. throw, cull, giveaway to charity, de-clutter, sell.
5. Fold & sort fabric then drawer it.
6. Sort, container, jar and box all the lace, ribbon, buttons and bits and pieces.
7. Scan in anything worth keeping from the years at uni and ditch the dodgy filing cabinets.
8. Move all the furniture around so that the sewing room is a nice place to be.
9. Put up/make some art and photos to make the sewing room a nice place to be.
10. Make some cushions for the futon that match the fabric on the back of the shelves.
11. Hook up the iron, camera charger, fan, sewing machine, overlocker, TV, the stereo and the old laptop in permanent non-cable across the room ways. 
12. Do some sewing of my February item in a nice place!

This is our lunch on the first day progress:

Painting Painting and more painting..white paint makes you blind!