Edinburgh Sewing Corner

This is a final opportunity to take pics of my sewing area before we move, and as I love to see other peoples' sewing rooms, I thought I'd share mine too. I tidied ALOT before taking these pictures, as the whole place was covered in tiny bits of threads, bigger bits of material and various cups etc. I'll take a picture of my new sewing area (when I have one) whilst work is in process so you don't get the misleading impression that I am in any way tidy when I sew. Apologies for the quality of the pictures, our flat gets very little light and I took these last night.

I use the dining room table for my sewing machine, which is in the corner of our living room on a little stage. Like most people I don't have the room for a dedicated sewing space at the moment, so most of this stuff has to be packed away if we ever have dinner at the table (which is almost never).

 I use the corner of the space for all my various boxes.  The box on the right is for keeping sewing projects in progress, along with patterns (which I have very few of these days) and interfacing. You can see on the top a skirt that I got in a charity shop a while ago and want to make smaller so it fits on my waist rather than on my hips (watch this space).
The vintage suitcase at the back contains all the materials I used to make my wedding fabric flowers, I'll have to do a post on these at some point, but I'm thinking of changing some of the colours so I'll let you know when I have made up my mind (I'm very bad for changing my mind all the time).

Here is my brilliant sewing box which holds all my tools; scissors, pins, rotary cutter, small fixings etc. It's the perfect size and I've had it for... 6 or 7 years? I got it from Dunelm mill.

I keep all my threads and buttons in a set of jars on top of the sideboard:

I love these old jars, and in fact like (seemingly most) sewers love jars of any kind. If Mr T would let me I would cover every surface with them. As it is I have to make do with these three (and two in the kitchen). The red stand up jar filled with buttons had a rather boring beige lid which I painted with red poster paint. It came out really well to say it was poster paint.

I also have these posters up on the wall from a series of nights we organised in Manchester back when we lived there. Alongside the 'Unquote' posters, a night organised by Mr T's sisters band, The Monkeys In Love. I love these posters as they all go so well together in their black and white, and they really show off the artistic talents of Mr T's family.

I keep all of my materials in the bedroom, on top of the wardrobe (excuse the mess). It does make getting at my material a complete nightmare as I have to get them down from a very high height. But in our tiny flat there really isnt anywhere else for it to go. I went for plastic containers after hearing such great things about being able to see what's in the box. And it works, so far, but with the fabrics seperated into the two biggest boxes, I do forget what I've got in there. Luckily I love looking through them all and just looking at my fabric, do you feel the same, or is this a bit of a chore you'd rather do without?

You can see that the top left box is what's left of my wool collection after giving away half of it at the Swap Shop. This is still a pretty big box though so I need to get knitting! I have a couple ideas of projects, so I'll post about those in the near future. The top left box is for unfinished projects (of which I have a shameful number), I just can't seem to muster up the energy to finish some of them. You can see a fabric dolls feet sticking out at the bottom, I feel particularly guilty about stuffing her in a box, but what could I do?

So I hope you've enjoyed looking through my cupboards (or lack of them), I've enjoyed sewing in this flat but it would be nice to have a space of my own. Fingers crossed for a sewing room! Any ideas for how I should store things in the future? Have you done any brilliant organisations lately? Or if you're looking for organisation inspiration, I'd recommend Sew Many Ways, which has an
                                                           amazing array of craft organisation ideas.

 Deborah