de Jong Dream House: craft room

Showing posts with label craft room. Show all posts

Sunday, October 27, 2019

One Monthly Goal :: October 2019 Update

Autumn is my favorite season. I love changing leaves. Our new lake house is surrounded by trees so I've been looking forward to seeing their fall foliage. They have not disappointed me.

With the weather cooling down, I set my goal to unpack my craft room. I am ridiculously lucky to have found a house in which I have such a lovely, large space. But it will take a little more than a month to get it in a more completed state. That said, I did make progress!

View from the door before and after.

The big obvious change is that I sorted through the 15 or so totes of donated fabric. I passed on about half of it to two local quilting ministries. There's a lot of non-quilting fabric that I will pass on to other organizations, and I'll incorporate the last bit into my stash. The hardest part of organizing my craft room has been figuring out how to work around those three support posts. I have a plan in the works. Stay tuned.

This is my stash wall. My new studio is a huge room without any closets. I'm storing my fabric in the same Sterilite bins I've been using since I started sewing--just many more of them! I chose the wall farthest from the window to avoid sun damage. Niels and I went on an IKEA date to pick up a few things, the main one being a 4th Kallax unit. Originally I had 3 units placed side by side. I decided to stack two sets of two instead to make more use of the high ceilings.

My shelving corner was mostly neglected this month as my priority was getting everything moved to the right place. I had these shelves put up this summer. I'm a little scared to go through those white flexible bins because they were some of the very last things packed on the last day when all the boxes, bins, totes, and grocery bags were filled. I'm sure I will find some treasures.

Here you can see where I've moved a few things around. The desk I have by the posts now is made up of the top of the tall "desk" in the before picture attached to some IKEA legs we had in storage. The brown CD rack has been moved to our theater room temporarily while we wait for a buyer on Amazon Marketplace. The white Trofast towers were moved back toward the posts. You can also see that I moved my long arm. The new white cutting board was a nice garage sale find!

I decided to move my long arm to the opposite side of the room because the posts are not in the center of the room. Moving it means I have more room to walk around it. Plus, having it in the back of the room makes it less likely to be bumped by young visitors. I sold the big brown bookcases because they took too much visual and physical room. I've re-organized the Trofast scrap bins so I have more space for each color, plus bins for squares that are 1.5", 2", and 2.5" squares.

Other than the long arm, the view from this corner hasn't changed too much. My sewing machines are along the wall to the right and they were the first things set up, along with my main table.

With the long arm moved to this side, and my desk and printer moved in its place, I now have a row of machines along the far wall.

The room looks the most different from this angle. It feels so much bigger without the big bookcases and after clearing out those tubs. I'm hoping to have some friends over for a quilting retreat next summer so I'm happy I can have so many spaces to cut and sew.

I'm still noodling through how I want to set up behind the machine. I have a leaning shelf, Kallax, and Trones. Only one will stay.

The Trones hold my gift wrap and Cricut vinyl. I think I will move them by the other cutting table so I don't have to walk around the long arm to wrap gifts. (Christmas is coming!)

Here's my thinking corner. I love this chair but I'm stalking Amazon Marketplace for a leather recliner, or maybe even a small chaise sleeper sofa in case we need an extra guest space. No hurry on that. I do like to have my legs up when I work on my computer to plan quilts or write blog posts like this one!

To see more pictures of the state of my craft room, check out #VesperViewStudio. To see what I'm currently working on, follow me at deJongDreamHouse.

Linked to:

Elm Street Quilts

Previous OMGs

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

One Monthly Goal :: July 2019

Summer is officially upon us and we are officially moved into the de Jong Lake House. There is chaos everywhere because it is impossible to unpack when the kitchen, mudroom, pantry, and laundry room are all being renovated! We are making do with a crockpot, secondhand microwave, and far too much eating out, but we are a few weeks away from being able to enjoy our upgrades.

Speaking of upgrades, I no longer have a craft room, I have a sewing studio! The previous owners used the 29' x 28' space as a play room, but I claimed it as my play room, which I am naming Vesper View Studio.

This is how it looked on closing day.

The big change we made was to replace the carpet with cork.

Then we changed the yellow stripes to Vesper Violet.

Finally, we changed the yellow can lights to bright daylight tiles.

Then, I moved all my stuff in. My room suddenly doesn't seem so big!

I've been focused on the renovations upstairs, as well as dealing with brain injury crashes, so I haven't been able to spend a lot of time getting things sorted downstairs. I'm not ambitious enough to make an organized sewing studio my One Monthly Goal!

Instead, my goal is to catch up on my TBI Temperature Quilt. This is the quilt I'm making this year to document my 15th year of living with a brain injury.

I haven't sewn any blocks for nearly a month! I do have a pretty good idea of when my crashes are because of my Fit Bit, and I can also use my summaries to tell when I napped. We are headed to the Netherlands to see my in-laws at the end of the month, so I have a bit of a fire under my backside to catch up before then!

I'm hoping, too, that by working on a little project, it will give me the push I need to find my rulers and figure out a good arrangement for everything. Maybe my August OMG will be to have my sewing studio ready for (virtual) tours and (real life) visitors!

To see more pictures of my progress, check out #VesperViewStudio on Instagram. If you want to see our upstairs renovations, look for #deJongLakeHouse. To see what I'm currently working on, follow me at deJongDreamHouse.

Linked to:

Elm Street Quilts

Previous OMGs

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

One Monthly Goal :: June 2019 Update

My OMG for June wass to pack up the craft room in the de Jong Dream House If you haven't seen it in it's glory, you can take a tour here.

Depending on how you look at it, my June One Monthly Goal was either really easy or really hard. It was easy in the sense that all I had to do was sit back and watch the movers pack up the craft room in my beloved de Jong Dream House. But realistically, it was really hard because change is hard. Whether or not you choose it or are chosen for it, change is a disruption to normal. Living with a brain injury, for me, means that routine and organization are necessary for me to function reasonably well. Moving is chaos, and I don't function well in chaos.

I mentioned in my original post that once we knew we were moving, my goal was to finish a specific few more quilts before moving day. I could not have cut it any closer!

In May, I was able to finish three quilts.

Big Lake Blooms was sent to my hometown in Minnesota for a fundraiser.

Theo's Milestone Quilt made it home to its new owner in time to commemorate his first month of life.

Omigolly Miss Jennifer went to our school secretary.

June is when things got hairy! I had one quilt left to finish, the school year was ending, and the movers were set to arrive a week earlier than we originally planned.

The night before the movers came, I had the top of Coded Thank You pinned and ready to quilt, and the binding prepared.

I should have saved myself some time and made a single print binding, but I was deep into my code theme and lots of little pieces to say "thank you" in Morse Code.

I woke up ridiculously early on moving day to start quilting.

By the time the moving truck arrived at 10, the quilting was mostly done. Much to Niels' chagrin, I would pack for 20 minutes, then quilt for 5 minutes. I really wanted to finish the quilt before moving because I knew it would take a few days (weeks? months?) before I would be settled enough to quilt in the new house.

We actually moved in two days. On the first day, we cleared out the second floor (bedroom and craft room) and lower level (so many books, and memory totes, and media!). The crew came back a week later to get everything that was left on the main level. So on this day, I was packing up the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, as well as my craft room during my intervals.

Fortunately, I keep most of my supplies in totes so I saved the crew time in having to wrap things up.

By the time the truck was filled and ready to make the first trip up to the Lake House, I had finished quilting.

By this point, the tough-looking movers were cheering me on. But they had a job to do. I was able to get my binding attached while they took the bowling alley top of my craft table.

While the guys wrestled with that beast, I used the unbored door that used to be the top of my craft table to clip and iron the binding.

When we returned for the second load, I ran upstairs to finish the binding while the crew removed items from my room.

It really came down to the wire.

The room was nearly empty by the time I finished.

My cheering section, aka the movers, volunteered to help take a "finished" picture.

And just like that, the craft room at the de Jong Dream House has become a bedroom in someone else's house.

We've been completely moved into the de Jong Lake House for ten days and it's still chaos. As expected, I have not done any sewing. I have been running on adrenaline for so long that my brain just gave up. So I've been doing a lot of sleeping and only a little bit of unpacking. Our new kitchen cabinets are installed, but we don't yet have appliances or counter tops. Our new family foyer has been painted and has flooring installed, but no cabinetry. So that means we have mudroom, laundry, pantry, and kitchen items in our bedroom, and our "kitchen" is a couple of portable tables with disposable dishes, a crock pot, and toaster. It's overwhelming but the end is in sight.

Also overwhelming is the current state of the new craft room, Vesper View Studio.