FINALLY SEWING!!!!!

After a few months of barely touching a sewing machine, I finally had some time to sew!!! I knew I was missing it, but really found out how much when I had a chance to sew. I finally found my happy place again! 

It's not quilting, but I'm working on some soft books, using up the book panels I had in stash. I cut out all the book panels a couple months ago, but never got a chance to sew them up.

I had five panels of the same book, and panels for five other books too. One soft book I finished and gave as a Christmas present. One I decided would be better used in a quilt, but all the rest I am sewing up now. I need to press these, topstitch around them sealing up the turning hole, then I can run a few lines of stitching up the center and they'll be done. I'll let DD#2 have whichever ones she likes for Mr. LJ, and the rest will go in the cupboard with other gifts. I try to always keep a few baby gifts on hand, because it's fairly frequent that I know someone having a baby. 

I'm pretty happy with my sewing set-up in my new bedroom. I had plenty of room to move around while sewing. There is overhead lighting right above my sewing cabinet, which was just serendipity, no plan for that. My ironing station has all my strings sorted by color, so I see a lot of string quilts in my future, and, I have all of my scrap user system in the linen closet in my bedroom.

This linen closet was my idea, and it was one of the things I was most excited about in our master suite. The original plans had this being an oddly shaped alcove that would have been hard to utilize, but I had them move the bedroom door over a foot, and I ended up with a pretty large linen closet. The alcove would have been hard to find a piece of furniture for, and since they were building around an existing chimney there was no way to not have the alcove. Alcove turned into linen closet is the best use of the space. 

With my strings and scrap user system all readily available, it should keep me busy for a while. My yardage is downstairs where DD#1's family is living, but I could get to it easily enough. It's really only my fat quarters-1 yard pieces that are inaccessible. I can also get to all of my UFO's, though only some of those are in my bedroom. 

Storage is always an issue when you move things around. I have all of my biggest rulers and cutting mats along a wall in a walk in closet elsewhere in the house. Mostly I'm planning on working with my strings, strips, or UFO's, so the big rulers probably aren't that big of a deal. I was trying to think outside the box on storing the smaller rulers. The smallest rulers fit in the drawers in my sewing cabinet, but what about those mid-sized rulers? I use those for trimming or sub-cutting strips, so I needed them available.

 It might be a bit hard to see, but I used Command hooks, and hung them along the inside walls of my sewing cabinet. You can pretty easily see how much stuff I have stored under the back extension table of my sewing cabinet.

I even hung some rulers along the back section of my cabinet! Since the area where my legs go is pretty large, I don't notice the rulers there at all, but it keeps them available should I need them. 

I bought a small set of shelves for more storage, but I haven't assembled those yet. I'll put up a pic when those are sorted. I do believe I will be able to sew just fine in my new master suite!