My new sewing/office space

September 18, 2016August 22, 20174 Comments

Advertising works on me. I saw an ad for Havenly.com on Instagram and was intrigued. They’re an online design service. For $199, you get two design concepts, an initial design and a final layout for the room plus a shopping list. You pay them and they handle the rest. You can buy all or nothing. Check out their designers here.

Using photos I uploaded and my Pinterest page, my designer, Heather H., of Austin, Texas offered two concepts:

Concept One

Concept Two

I made comments about what I liked and what I didn’t. I told Heather that Concept One was “sew sweet” and Concept Two was “sew cool” and I wanted to be COOL. That resulted in this concept:

I commented again and this was the final presentation:

I purchased the desk and the cutting table as well as a computer keyboard system from HumanScale.

The curtains were listed at $530 for the two panels and I knew I could make them myself. I contacted my friend Ana who works at U-Fab and is a fellow Central Virginia Modern Quilt Guild member. She found me a great option, $12.99 a yard, and they made the curtains for $89 each, which is a great price, for a total of $300 for the two panels.

I painted the walls a light gray, Reflection, from Sherwin Williams.

I decided to wait to buy the rug since I had a rug I could use for now. After everything arrived I placed the furniture in different locations. The cutting table was bigger than I anticipated but I love the counter height and the extra space. I’m undecided about getting the chair — which I think is heavenly.

Now for the GRAND REVEAL. I don’t know how those magazines and design bloggers get such great wide views. You’ll see it got dark while I tried to get the perfect shot.

View from the Entrance of the Room

View of the Sewing Machine Table and Cutting Table.

Cutting Table — love these street signs I got at a salvage yard. The lamp is handmade from an Etsy shop called Lampada.

View from my desk.

Scrap bins find a home under the cutting table.

More scrap bins on an old ladder we purchased in 1990. The print, Peachy Keen, was bought through Havenly.

My new desk. I use Big Book of Quilting to raise my laptop. I use two monitors so it looks cluttered. Those design bloggers probably would have styled it by removing them, but this is real life.

The design wall came with me from the apartment, and I’ve blogged about it previously.

That’s it — somewhere between Sew Sweet and Sew Cool.

Wanda

Whew!

July 25, 2016July 24, 20165 Comments

We moved into our new home almost a month ago. It started out with a bang. We were moving some items in Dave’s pickup truck and as he exited the vehicle, the only tree in our yard slowly fell on the roof and hood of his truck. Dave watched, helplessly. He was not injured.

Luckily, across the street was a car alignment shop and one of the mechanics, Bill, knew someone who could come over right away and extract the tree from the truck. The local collision center sent a tow truck. It was not totaled. Yippey! Ti’s a 2003 Chevrolet Silverado and the current value is about $3000. It doesn’t have a lot of mileage so we were relieved we didn’t have to buy a new vehicle.

We used a rental vehicle and our insurance for that ran out last Friday. At $38 a day, it adds up fast. We picked the truck up on Friday. It cost $5800 to repair. We had $500 deductible. But, wow — a very expensive tree.

We used movers for all our furniture and that part was seamless.

Unpacking and organizing takes longer than you expect. There is disorder almost everywhere. We have sheets on the bed and clothes in the closet, plus clean towels, so we are not suffering. We have eaten out a lot, and it’s time to go on a diet.

I’m excited to design my new office sewing studio. More on that later.

Wanda

The Story of SCALE

June 13, 2016June 12, 20163 Comments

SCALE was the third chapter of the Savor Each Stitch Book Bee. Carolyn Friedlander’s book has a photo of bales of hay in front of a house and tree.

The caption reads, “Scale is relative to everything around it.”

On June 2, 2015, I wrote this in the book bee community:

I don’ t have a design in mind for Scale. I pulled some prints — large to small to inspire me. CF’s Circle Lattice is interesting and I like the idea of a large applique piece.

I had pulled some Kaffe prints and I sketched a large applique:

At the same time, my daughter was home for the summer from college and we visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit: Van Gogh, Manet and Matisse. The Art of the Flower. The exhibit was very crowded and the art was displayed in different rooms in chronological order, beginning with the early Impressionists. The early works were so real. The ladybugs on the leaves looked like they were alive right there on the paintings. Van Gogh’s work wasn’t lifelike but the paint was three dimensional . By the end I felt I had traveled through time, and I felt dizzy and overwhelmed by FLOWERS.

That experience stayed with me and I made a large applique flower (no photo). BUT, I didn’t like it.

I liked the Kaffe prints so I made a tote bag as a Scale warm-up.

Since I liked the idea of a large flower, I created a large improvisational “flower” using solid scraps.

I didn’t like how the small flowers were interacting with the large one.

On July 16, 2015, I wrote:

My Scale study has taken another turn. I decided to make some large and small improv “flowers.” I did that and tried to assemble them. Hated it, then slashed and reassembled them, and I think I’m getting somewhere. Now to decide if I need a border and how much border. I think it needs some “breathing space” — not sure what would be best. Blue perhaps.