Tag: Organization

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An Organized Workspace

I keep accumulating more things ribbons, fabrics, books, thread, yarn, etc… and I have such a small workspace/sewing area that it was beginning to be so cluttered. I would have to move a pile out of the way to cut out fabric. Then, I would move the pile out of the way to get to one sewing machine, then the other. And on and on and on. I was drowning in sewing supplies. Yet…. you can never have too many supplies. What I needed was to utilize the wall. Shelves would need to go up. I found some awesome floating shelves….crazy expensive is what they were. Part of the reason I have taken up sewing so much is to save money. So, I hit up our local hardware store and picked up some cheap particle board shelves with some brackets. I even splurged an extra $2 and got two brackets that would hold a dowel rod for my ribbons!

Here is my little corner of the basement/playroom. I still have boxes and bins full of fabric and old clothes to cut up for fabric under all the tables. I’m also thinking of getting one more shelf.

See my window….no I really don’t drink that much.

The other side of my little corner. More bins and boxes of fabric under my cutting table. The containers on the wooden desk are all different colored snaps. Another window full of wine bottles. I swear I don’t drink that much. I keep collecting them to paint though!

Here is my stash of yarn. I need to figure out a better way to keep it all up on the shelf. Maybe some wire bins turned on their sides? I will keep trolling pinterest for some ideas.

Here are my sewing books and the awesome hand spun wool I got from the farmer’s market.

 

Here are my useable fabrics and scraps and my thread. On the right I used a magazine holder to put my patterns….it is stuffed pretty full right now so I need to come up with a different solution for that.
 I also left space for another thread holder. I have the thread to fill it but need the money and the time for another trip to the store.

Here is my cutting table with my planning bulletin board over it…right now it is covered with patterns I need to put away. The table is just a standard 4 foot folding table that was raised up by using some PVC pipes (I forgot to take a picture of that but you can sort of see them in the top picture)

Here is my dowel rod ribbon holder. Only room for a little bit more ribbon so I will need to figure out more storage space for more ribbons soon. I will wait until that point comes to think about  it though. To the right of the shelf you can see my crazy huge roll of fleece. I also have miscellaneous supplies on this shelf; paper crafts, elastics, bias tape, lace, glues and interfacing.
 Now I have until Saturday to sew a birthday dress for Miss Faye! It is nice to have room for all the sewing!

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Rag Bags

I have always tended toward the crunchy side of life. I breastfeed for more than a year (I almost made it to 2 years with each of my boys), I use cloth diapers, the main cleaning chemicals in our house are baking soda and vinegar, and we use rags instead of paper towels.

I make all our rags out of old t-shirts. Instead of tossing it when it gets a hole in it, we put it in a box in my sewing area. After I have collected a few, then I will spend an afternoon cutting them up (I cut the seams out and any pictures get cut out) and I finish the edges with my serger.

If you take the step to go paperless in your home it is great, but once you do, you realize that you have to find a solution to the storage of the rags. I found a pattern for a rag bag in the book Handmade Home by Amanda Blake Soule that I just loved. It turns out it is very easy to make as well.

I ended up making a few more as gifts! One for my mom.

 One for my cousin J.

 And one for my other cousin J

I hung it from a hook in the dining room low enough so that my youngest (at the time he was 2) could get in the bag to have access to the rags. We use the rags for everything you would use a paper towel for; cleaning up spills, as a napkin, washing windows, etc…. I wash them with our towels, in cold water with vinegar in the rinse cycle. No fabric softener is used on them at all.

I am glad that we made the switch and even more glad that I found an attractive solution to rag storage!

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A Laundry Schedule

Everyone hates laundry. I know of no one that enjoys it. Yet, it has to be done….and there is a LOT of laundry for a family of 5. Sheets, towels, baby socks, rags (we don’t use paper towels here, only cloth), kid’s clothing with only one a small difference in size….well, you get the picture. It is a lot of laundry that is not that fun to sort. We kept getting to the point of drowning with all of the folding. No one wanted to fold because it was so difficult to sort at the same time (well, really only Greg did the laundry before. He always gets mad that I say we when it is only him doing something), plus the space needed to have all the folded piles was immense. Think about taking all the clothing for 5 people and washing it by sorting darks from whites….now imagine folding it all. 5 piles for underwear, 5 piles for socks, 5 piles for pants, etc. Needless to say that method is the wrong one with so many people…oh, yeah….and having to check the tags for all the kid pants and shirts to know which pile to put it in just added more to the fun factor.

I started checking out all the pinterest laundry pins I could find. Then I started googling it. I decided that we would just give up clothing and become nudists start assigning each person a laundry day. We hit the store and got a couple more baskets and now each person in our house has their own. Not only that, but the cloth diapers, and towels, and sheets each have their own baskets as well.

Every two to three days I have to do a load of diapers.

This is working out really well for us. Each person puts their dirty clothes in “their” basket and on their laundry day they bring their basket to the living room. I get it washed and folded and back in the basket by the end of the day (let’s be honest here….rarely does it actually get folded that day, but it does get cleaned and dried that day). Each person is then responsible for putting their clothes away (well, except Faye). When the folding does happen it is much easier to just grab a basket and fold that one person’s things and put it back in the basket.

Now what I want to do is to build one of the basket towers that I keep finding on Pinterest, like this one…

If anyone has any wonderful tips on getting a magic fairy into the house to fold all this laundry that would be great..