sewing room progress

I've been slowly pecking along on my sewing room re-do over the past month, and I am happy to say that it is almost done now.  Yay!  I finished painting the walls last weekend.  The color is Pinedale Shores by Behr, and I love it like crazy.

I also sewed some new curtains for the closet doorways, recovered a stool, painted a spool rack, and refinished a mirror.  The mirror was originally boring brown, so I painted it black and then glued strips from a vintage tape measure around the edge to dress it up a little.  It's nothing fancy, but I think it adds a fun little touch to the sewing theme of my room.

Now I just need to sew a valance for the window and hang a few more things on the walls and then my happy little sewing room will be complete. 

DIY pattern cork board

I've been using tissue paper pattern pieces in mixed media art for many years now, so when I decided to spruce up a boring old cork board for my sewing room re-do, this seemed like a really fun (and fitting!) technique to use.  It's not rocket science, so I didn't bother making a step-by-step tutorial or anything like that.  All you do is decoupage over the cork with your pattern pieces and keep overlapping them and layering them until you get the look that you want.  I would normally recommend using Modge Podge for this sort of thing, but I didn't have any on hand, so I used watered down Elmer's glue this time, and that worked great too.

The tissue patterns create a beautiful antique-looking surface that reminds me of parchment or leather.  It almost seems a shame to cover it up with stuff on my pin board.  But this technique would also work great as surface decoration for lampshades, furniture, or other sewing room nick-knacks.  I thought about pattern-collaging those big letters that you hang on your walls... if I could just figure out what to make it say.  I don't think "she who dies with the most fabric wins" would fit on the walls of my small sewing room.  Darn.

I finished it up the board by painting the wood frame with glossy black paint, and I'm using some short ball-headed sewing pins to pin things to my board.

And BTW - thanks to all of you who have been sharing pics and project ideas from your own sewing rooms.  It has been so much fun to see how other costumers organize and decorate their spaces.

what I've been up to

Okay. So I want to start out by apologizing for not working more on moving things from my old website to this new one. I know most of the articles and galleries are still missing, and a lot of the articles that are here now have broken image links... and I told you all that it would be fixed by now. To make it worse, I've been a horrible webmistress, and I haven't even replied to most of the emails that I have received about my site migration. I'm truly sorry. :(  But honestly guys, it's just miserable work for me, and I wanted to spend my precious time this summer being creative and productive and happy and making new things - not staring at a computer, fixing code, and reworking webpages from a decade ago. I know that doesn't help you if you really needed some information in an old dress diary or article, but I decided to be selfish with my time for a little while longer. I hope you understand and don't hold it against me (too much), and I'll try again to work on site stuff this fall. 

So what have I been doing over the past few weeks? We'll, I've been working on four vintage outfits for guild events this year, plus I have completely remodeled and reorganized my sewing room, which was the biggest project of all. I'm still working on decorating it and making everything pretty now, and hopefully I'll be able to share some before and after pics with you soon.

But in the meantime, I thought I would post a few of the sewing room projects that I've been working on. As usual, I've been hugely inspired by a bunch of crafty pins on Pinterests, and that's where I found this tutorial about recovering an old ironing board.  I don't have the space to keep a full-sized ironing board out in my new sewing space, so I decided to just recover my table-top board from college and use that on my cutting table when I need it for quick work.  Mine isn't nearly as bright and fun as some of the recovered boards that I've seen on Pinterest, but it has 1/4" stripes on it, which makes it wonderful for pleating and measuring fabric as I iron, and it is just SO much cleaner and nicer than my old cover.  It's amazing how big of a difference little stuff like that can make.  The whole project only took me 20 minutes from start to finish, and I felt so nice when it was done that I was wondering why I never thought of doing this before! 

So what are some of your favorite DIY sewing room projects or sewing room-related inspirations?  I've been having so much fun seeing what other people do to organize and beautify their creative spaces.