You may remember reading about how I had outgrown my art room space upstairs and was going to take over the family garage. In my last post about my studio move, I had moved a little desk for blogging, bill paying etc. into my bedroom next to my bed. You can read about all that here.
Since then, I've moved my big Mac into what is now called my office. Its office space on one side and a sewing space on the other. Both work very nicely together and I have beautiful light in this room with plantation shutters to direct it appropriately. It also has a street view and I enjoy being able to watch people walking by. I feel quite secure in here and am even beginning to venture downstairs to this room in the evenings to catch up work when needed.
So to the right I have built in storage that my dad built & secured many years ago on the wall which now houses all my fabric fat quarters & felt perfectly. I have my Mac, printer & scanner for my graphics work & my Scrapps Flea Market uploading, editing etc.
In the Ikea expedit on the back wall, I house all my art books & magazines as well as my scrapbook albums, vintage sheet collection & now I have my 12x12 paper racks right on top of that unit too along with a couple of white baskets to house bits & pieces.
I very much need to cull my magazine collection. I mainly have Stampington publications [not sure I can ever part with these] but I also have a few old scrapbook magazines are in there too. I have a filing cabinet drawer full of issues where I was published [hard to throw those out] but I really don't need any others since I haven't scrapbooked for years. Not quite sure who/where to pass them to. Maybe the recycling bin...
To the left of my bookshelf, is my sewing bench made up of two shorter trestle tables & a 2 drawer filing cabinet. I keep all my art prints for sale filed in the filing cabinet. My overlocker & sewing machine have a desk each and the girls sewing machine sits on the filing cabinet waiting to be used. The girls have done some machine sewing on my machine but we haven't yet made time for them to learn on their own machine. Next school holidays for sure!
Under those tables I have a mountain of cushion inserts, bags of fabrics & more bags of opshop fabric finds in the form of clothing waiting to be upcycled. I definitely have enough supply to entertain many many future projects!
So thats my office/sewing area.
Right across the other side of the entrance hall is our garage which now houses my painting & making studio!
Here's a pic of the hole that our carpenter made, before the doors were fitted. It cost about $1200 all up to knock the wall, re-route electrics, put double doors & all the moldings in, add locks, door handles & fittings etc. It was a project well worth our money.
So you can see the black hole of the garage here from the entrance hall.
And this shot below is taken from inside the garage, looking across the hall into my office. Its very nice to have all my creative & business dealings in two distinct areas, but adjacent to each other. My making & business dealings are not really in full swing with 3 little kids at home with me during work hours but I suspect once they all go to off to school that I will be able to work very effectively here in years to come. Exciting!
Here's a view into the garage space in the early days. A couple of bookshelves that needed to be emptied & cleaned. Odd bits of furniture. And a few bits of furniture waiting to be made over. Can you see the little red & yellow cabinet bottom centre? It has just had its little makeover! Post on that coming up next.
So anyway, we have dismantled, moved, tidied & arranged so many things to get my painting studio up & running but I'll save most of that for another post.
I'll finish my post here with a sneaky peak into my studio that is now, far from perfect, but in stage one working order. Lighting has been installed, about $600 worth including 4 sets of track spotlights. I've got all my supplies moved in & tables to work on. Hurrah! The kids and I have done a little making in here already but now just waiting for warm weather to get cracking on some SERIOUS making. Fun!!
