Making Progress!

I am finally making some serious progress on the new sewing room! Today I finished getting the last of the stuff out of the old sewing room closet, and I plugged in my sewing machines! I can actually sew now! I had to buy new extension cords for this new room. Since I opted to put storage along the walls and make my sewing area in the center of the room, it necessitated extension cords, but I needed to get flat plugs so they didn't stick out too far since there are shelves in front of all the outlets. It was funny when I was shopping for the new extension cords, because I didn't know what to call the type of plugs I wanted. Come to find out, it depends on which company makes them on what they are called. Some call them flat plugs, some 90 degree plugs and others call them wall hugger plugs. I ordered the extension cords from Amazon, and they got here in two days. I had looked for them at a couple stores in town, but didn't see what wanted.

Here is my wall of fabric. I am incorporating all of my scrub stash into my quilting stash, so even though I've had all this fabric for a while, now I am storing it together. There are open spaces on the shelves, that I left on purpose because not all of my scrub fabric is on mini bolts yet. I am waiting for DH to cut me some more mini bolt forms from corrugated plastic.

DH and I went up to Phoenix to see my sister, so we stopped at Ikea to buy the new shelves. I found out they no longer make the doors to match my older sets of shelves. There was a note on the doors closest in style to my doors that said they were out of stock until further notice. A saleperson came to help us and she checked the computer and said the sign was wrong and they were in stock. Well, we went to get the shelves and the doors, and at first we grabbed the birch doors, when we wanted white, so we put those back, made sure we were getting the doors that were labeled white, and made our purchase. Obviously from the picture, you can see the doors are not white, they are dark brown.

Actually, I found the entire purchase a little disappointing. The first time I bought these shelves, they were made in Italy, this time they were made in China. The dimensions say they are the same size, but the shelves are actually not as deep as my old ones. They changed the door style, which I understand their reasoning for, but it is disappointing none the less. Only the middle shelf is in a fixed position, and my old doors have strips of trim that looks great when the shelves are evenly spaced, which is how I have mine. If someone wanted to adjust their shelves to different spots, the door trim would look odd. The new style doors only have trim across the middle, which should hit it right at the fixed middle shelf. Unfortunately, all of the trim on the new doors are off, and none of the trim on the doors covers the middle shelf. That's not saying much for their quality control. I'm also not thrilled with the fact the brown doors were stocked in the spot for the white doors. DH offered to bring them back, but we really have no time to make another trip up there for at least two weeks, and probably not for over over a month. It is 110 miles from our house to Ikea so mapquest says. It is just not worth it to me to travel 220 miles round trip to switch out the doors, which I am not sure are actually in stock. If it really starts bugging me I can bring one of the shelves to Home Depot right around the corner, have them computer match the paint color, and paint the doors. That would be much cheaper than gas to drive to Ikea and back. I may be mildly annoyed at how things turned out, but I am still happy I have more shelves with doors to keep my fabric in view and dust free. The benefits far outweigh any annoyance I feel at the doors not matching.


Here are my multimedia shelves with the 1 yard and less pieces on them. Those sets of shelves aren't the same color either, they no longer make the color of the first set I bought. I'm sensing a mismatched pattern here ;-) The glass jars I store notions in are mismatched on purpose! Maybe I shouldn't bother ever trying to match anything in this room? You can also see the quilt I am going to quilt next on my Juki cabinet. It doesn't really match either since it is made from orphan blocks! This is getting to be pretty funny :-) I could use some sewing therapy after the weeks of chaos from moving the house all around.

I mounted my design "wall" today. I had three foam boards wrapped with black flannel on the door to my old sewing room. I bought a fourth foam board today, wrapped it in black flannel and mounted the four boards on the doors to the wardrobe. This room has no doors to it, so this was my best option. I really like using foam board for this purpose. If I am just putting blocks up, they will stick to the flannel, but long pieces like these borders, I can pin up since the foam board is about 1/4 inch thick. The foam board is lightweight, so I just use removable 3M foam tabs to stick them up. No damage done to whatever I stick them to. The best part, foam board was on sale at Michael's for $1.50 a sheet so it is CHEAP!

I still have quite a few things without a home. The pile of my sewing stuff in the little guest room is bigger than the last time I took a picture of it. Some of that I can take care of as soon as I get the forms for the minibolts cut. Some of it I may need to be creative with. I have two totes with garment fabric in them. Those may stay in that little guest room for a while. You can get to the bed in the guest room now, so if I don't get any more done for a while, it's OK. My sewing room is functional now, and the twins new room is emptied of all my stuff, and ready to made into a cute new room for them. I'm hoping we get some time to work on their room this week, hang their curtains, and put their clothes away in the closet.

I am trying to figure out how to rearrange my living room to make better use of the space, but I'm drawing a blank on that. I think I've used up all my rearranging creativity for a while. Maybe by the time I get the next quilt quilted, I will come up with a good idea for the living room. Sometimes when I'm not trying to think of a solution, the answer comes to me.