Once upon a time, I had my own place and the sewing area was as much space as I felt I needed. As you can imagine, that was a fair bit of the apartment -- at least the living room, and at one point, the dining room and spare bedroom as well. Well, times have changed over the years, and a lack of funding lead to a lack of space, and then the presence of a roommate with some sort of thread intolerance lead to an even greater lack of space. The final draw, recently, was moving back in with my parents and having to fit all of my sewing stuff into a 10x12' room. (As though that weren't hard enough, I also have to fit my clothes, books, files, tv, bed, and two cats in the same room. Yipes!)
This article is dedicated to all of you who are, similarly, being totally denied any reasonable amount of space in which to set up your sewing area. It may be useful if you're trying to explain to whomever you live with just why you need to spend money on storage containers or *gasp* an organizational system. I'll give you three setups I've used over the years -- one takes up a small dining room, one a decent wall, and finally, the one that's letting me fit everything in my room right now.
You should know from the start that the cost of the system required to get everything into the space is inversely proportional to the size of the space things must be gotten into. In a big room, you can get by with a table, a chair, and cardboard boxes for fabric. It'll look a mess (I've tried it), and they'll be cat fur and worse on everything, but it kinda works. In a smaller room, you'll need to invest in shelves, and sturdy, stackable containers for fabrics. In a very small space, Ikea becomes your friend. Ikea is certainly my friend. I owe the fact that I can walk across my room to Ikea. They have saved me. I have joined the cult, and now I serve the Kool-aid. ;)
Dedicated Room
Two domiciles ago, I had an 8'x7' dining room dedicated to sewing. Why the dining room? Because having clients into your bedroom for fittings can be unnerving to everyone involved.
The setup involved a sewing table, tall wire shelves, and two short book shelves. The sewing table was a 3'x2' desk top sitting on top of two wire rolling carts, which gave me a good but of storage under it. Of the tall wire shelves, one was set up to house fabric as hanging flat-folds, and the other held fabric in bins and general supplies. A small rod between the two shelves gave me a place to hang projects that were still "in the works".
Pros: Nice big, reasonably large area to play in. Also, the wall behind the sewing table was entirely mirrored, so I used it as a giant white board and kept lists of what I needed to get done and in what order, supplies I was out of, etc. That was great.
Cons: My organizational skills hadn't quite grown in yet, and I was still trying to use containers that were too large to stay organized. Also, all that floor space gave me lots of tempting square footage to set things down "just until I find a better place" -- in the long run, it looked like I was housing giant, fabric loving ant hills.
Cost: The wire shelves ran 40$ each, and the rolling carts under the sewing table were 25$ each. (I already had one of each, though.) The short book shelves were, I believe, $15 each. The desk top on the carts was from a desk I'd had since I was 8, and I think doesn't count. I didn't invest a penny in new storage containers.
Up Against the Wall
The next incarnation of the sewing room was a single wall setup in the bedroom of my last apartment.
The only additional furniture needed to make this work was a longer sewing/project table. (The computer lived there too, so it wasn't technically all project space.) I looked into getting a laminate counter top for this, but the size I needed cost more than I wanted to pay for it. Instead, I got a long piece of cheapo pine board (18"x6'), and added 9 self-adhesive tiles to the top. I happened to have a couple 1x8s lying around the apartment (like ya do, right? Ok, they were bogarted from a shelf setup I had), so those were run between the shelves and over a rolling cart to create a stable base for the work surface. Well, mostly stable. A few screws would have been a good idea.....
When full, the wall looked something like this:
Pros: This setup let me fit more into a single 14'x2' area than I'd have thought possible, and worked reasonably well for actual production.
Cons: I got a fair number of splinters from my work surface, those big bins of costume were pretty hard to navigate and retrieve things from, and my organizational tactics were still not entirely up to the task at hand (though things were getting a lot better).
Cost: The work surface cost me about 16$, between lumber and tiles. The shelves and carts were re-used from the last setup. I started investing in smaller storage containers -- I'm a huge fan of using small kitchen storage containers for sewing things (the kind meant to hold a sandwich or a single serving of leftovers), so the containers work out to about 50c each. Not bad, that. I also had about 10 plastic shoe boxes at 1$ each in the mix. One of the biggest expenses was the binders that I started keeping patterns in. 4$ each, because I'm a terrible binder snob. Sorry. I really like the ones with the rounded ends and hard plastic covers. The other kinds get all ratty at the corners. I'd bought those storage bins to move years back, at 5$ each.
IKEA, Iluvya
When I moved back into my parents' house, I knew space would be at a premium and that it would take a master feat of organization if I didn't want to part with 85% of my stuff. (This is the room I grew up in. I had a pretty good idea of how much it can hold.)
I invested a tidy sum in a system meant for closet storage. It's all made of shelves mounted on floor to ceiling poles. With as little space as I have to work with right now, it's important to take advantage of wall space from the top to the bottom. I could have gotten a cheaper system, but this one is something that I can move with me and grow with. I set it up over an L shape because I didn't have a long enough wall for anything else. That's another advantage to buying flexible storage thingies -- you can set them up as you please. This one also has a fairly small footprint, so I can store things under the shelves as well. (My TV/VCR, DVD player, CD burner, DVDs, tapes, and some art supplies live on a cart that rolls under the desk with the computer on it, for example. My shoes, in their nice little shoe boxes, live under the desk as well. There's a small cart of drawers with threads, boning, dyes, and what-have-you under the other side.) If you want to be able to cram a bunch of stuff under your work surface, it's worth looking into the idea of setting the work surface higher than a normal desk. Mine's at 35", so most readily available office carts roll under it just fine. (I sew standing up. It's weird, but my butt doesn't fall asleep this way.) For the first time *ever*, I actually have wall mounted task lighting so I can see what the heck I'm doing -- I've had little desk lamps on my sewing surface, but I always move them so I have more room to work. I also have a small container for every single type of craft supply, notion, and sundry I own. It's a pain to put things away sometimes (and it tends to only get done every couple weeks), but it helps me stay sane when I need to grab supplies and work somewhere else. I made myself two nice little padded project boards (from a pair of cheapo walmart pre-stretched art canvases), so I can post lists, measurements, nauseatingly cute pictures of me and my sweetie, etc. The breakdown of what all is in the L shaped area goes something like this:
And the full panoramic view of the room is like this:
Obviously, there's a couple products that really helped out here. First and foremost, those Space Bag thingers work a wonder. I didn't trust the idea for years, because I didn't see how something sold on late-night infomercials could possibly be part of my life, but honestly..... They're FAN-ta-BU-lous. All of my costumes (except for the two I'm most likely to wear) are currently in space bags, and stored in a 2'x3'x2' overhead cubby over the closet. That used to take a stack of bins that was 2'x2'x9', plus a few more. Space Bags work a wonder. You do have to mind the "don't fill past this line" line, though, or the re-flate in the closet and it gets very difficult to remove the offending bag to redo it. Shoe boxes and Ziploc reusable leftover containers have also helped immensely. (You can really use any leftover container on the market -- I like the ziploc ones because the white lids work with my color scheme. A girl's gotta have standards, you know?) For the most part, I only use three sizes of container for most of my organization -- the ziploc ones (2"x4.5"x8"), plastic shoe boxes (6"x12"x5") and a set of containers actually marketed for storing stuff (10"x8"x18"). If you stick with only a couple sizes of container, things look neater and it becomes much easier to stack things. I used to insist on only using containers with some sort of creative appeal because the plain ones are, well, pretty boring, but they were all different sizes and could only be stacked in a certain order if they could be stacked at all. With these, the container I've used most recently is always on top of a pile. Since I seem never to grab everything I need at once, this is very helpful. Those of you with better attention spans might not need to implement LIFO storage structures. ;) (Last In First Out -- if you're not a programmer, trust me: that was humor.)
I used to watch a huge amount of home improvement shows (and would, still, if my dad didn't have official control of the remote ad eternum). I'm hopelessly addicted to Clean Sweep and, er, the other clean-you-up-and-get-you-organised show on HGTV. The Other Show had a special where the organized a sewing room. The organizer lady used really nice, relatively large lined baskets to store all the fabric and stuff (rule 1: identical containers are more visually calm and appear more orderly), BUT you couldn't see what was below the first strata of each basket. To get around this, she implemented a series of binders with a swatch of each fabric, the available yardage, and storage bin it was located in. The seamstress was delighted. I was horrified. What person who's officially disorganized enough to end up on that show is going to maintain that system? (Rule 2: organization you can't easily maintain through as-used and weekly cleanups is not really organization. It's just neat piles waiting to explode again.) Unless you've actually installed a warehouse inventory control system with handheld scanners and an updating pick system, the binder thing is not for the perpetually disorganized. Personally, anything I can't see might as well not exist. (Trivia: the human brain is supposed to come up with the idea of "object permanence" -- things don't cease to exist just because they're out of sight -- very early on in development. I think it happens right after spit bubbles cease to be a high form of communication. I'm a little developmentally impaired. I still haven't gotten past the joy of spit bubbles.)
There's also some sort of raging debate over whether you should store stuff in small containers, or large ones. Here's my take: At this point, I figure that if I have so much of something that it requires a larger container than the 10"x8"x18" hummers, I should either a) use some of it, since I'm clearly stockpiling, or b) break it up for greater ease of finding when I need to. Case in point: Feathers. I have a lot of feathers. I used to keep all the feathers in a single, large box. I ended up not using the feathers, or buying new ones, because pawing through a large box of feathers when you have several rather curious felines around is dangerous (to you and the feathers). There are about 5 kinds of feather that I'm most likely to need: ostrich plumes, peacock, dyed coque, those funny little zippy thin ones, or pre-made pads. Ostrich plumes are easy to find in a box, especially when you have a pound of them in two bundles. The other ones each got put into a small ziploc container, then the containers went into the box with the rest of the feathers. Presto change-o, I could find the ones I needed. I could even transport the ones I needed to my millinery class, where people got the bizarre notion that I was one of those organized people. So weird. (I've since separated the feathers further, and they now live in two large plastic boxes (good ostrich plumes and assorted birdie bits, and rather crap ostrich plumes) and 4 small ziploc ones.) At this point, if it needs more than the 10"x8"x18" box, I flag it for eventual sorting and reorganization. And it's good. I can find my stuff, now that I'm done moving. Incidentally, moving and resetting up the majority of my sewing room took about 5 hours. Organized stuff is ready to be chucked into a box, then back onto a shelf. (Now, moving the rest of my life, around hospital crap, faire, classes, and what-have-you, took several months, and I couldn't use the organized sewing area because there was a disorganized pile of recently moved things in front of it, filling the floor space between the sewing area and the bed. Ignore that. It was a lot of stuff to find places for. I've only just gotten the computer plugged in and turned on. It's not even networked yet.)
Pros: I got most everything in here and I can still move. I know where to find stuff. I didn't have to sell all my old costumes on ebay.
Cons: I need a stool to get to stuff on the upper shelves, the size of the area means it requires more or less constant vigilance in the cleaning department and a single project left out makes it look entirely cluttered, and the system was far more expensive than I'd really have liked (though far less than I could have spent).
Cost: Stolmen storage system (IKEA 2005/2006 catalog, pg 59): 4 posts @ 30$ each, 2 shelves (21"x19") at 15$ each, 6 shelves (21"x13") @ 10$ each, 3 clothes rods (21") @ 2.50$ each, 3 six packs of mounting gidgies @ 15$ each, one miserable extra mounting gidgie @ 2.50$, and 3 hooks @1$ each. Total is $271, if addition serves me well. Additionally, about 10 more shoe boxes @ 1$ each, 2 things of hangers @ 1$ each, a rolling cart with drawers @ 15$, two wall mounted lights @ 5$ each (IKEA, mysteriously not in lighting section of catalog), and one ceiling mounted system of 5 can lights @ 9$ or something silly (also mysteriously not in catalog). Not having to constantly fight with my mother about the state I left her sewing area in? Priceless.
That's all I've got. Hopefully, something in here will help some other poor fool who has six pair of scissors, all of which are currently lost. I've been there. And I'd rather spend my sewing time sewing, rather than looking for my scissors. How 'bout you?
