Welcome to My World!

If I haven't mentioned much about quilting lately, it's because I haven't had nearly enough time to actually QUILT since I've had other things going on. When I HAVE had time to quilt, it's been spent, well, quilting, and that's kind of a time consuming process. So I thought tonight I'd take you on a little tour of the Sweat Shop and give you a glimpse of where I live much of the time and what I'm working on. Ready?

Come on in! Don't be afraid! I straightened up in here because I knew you were coming. Well, not really, but I didn't have time to bake a cake and I wanted to make you feel welcome!

As you can see from just inside the door, I have a small TV that I can watch while I sew. This is pretty much the view I see from my chair in front of the sewing machine. Those little quilts on the wall were given to me by some of my close quilty friends; by the way, the sign outside the door was a gift from a good friend too. Aren't quilters the best?! In the bottom right of the picture, there's a quilt rack that's somewhat buried under UFOs--these are actually UFOs that all need some kind of applique to morph into the beauties I know they can become! I'm kind of a Thimbleberries addict, so the entire wire drawer unit below the TV holds Thimbleberries fabrics. Come a little further into the room and see what I've been working on.

Isn't that one of the brightest quilts you've seen? It's actually much brighter in person! I had made a quilt (which is waiting on the applique rack) using one of the great Fig Tree lines of fabric (check out Joanna's blog!) and had a bunch left over, so I decided to see what I could make with it--the green, pink, and yellow are the leftovers. I had this other fairly gaudy fabric in my stash that looked good with all those colors; it also had red in it (pink and red? yikes!) so I pulled some red fabric from my stash too. This is way out of my normal color comfort zone, but I like it, and it will look nice on my bed for spring.

Now come around to the other side of the table.

(To orient you, you'll see that same quilt rack there on the bottom left.) When I decided to use this room as my Sweat Shop, I removed the doors of the closet and added shelves and another wire drawer unit. There's a foot stool (for the cats) and a large fabric basket (to hold current projects) in front of it so you can't see very well, but on the bottom are two LARGE wire baskets for scraps. I keep whichever machine I'm not using on the desk top. Above that are shelves full of swapped blocks, kits, large lengths of fabric for backs or whatever, wool, and other "stuff." (There are a few more shelves above where the photo cut off.)

Heading back out of the room, you can see more of my shelves for "stash." I designed the shelving in the room and my father-in-law was kind enough to build it. The shelves wrap around half the room, from the doorway to the window on the far wall. Only these go all the way to the floor; the rest of the shelving goes from the ceiling to about mid wall. They're only 7" deep, so they hold a lot of fabric but don't take up too much of the space in the room--something that was very important to me since my room only measures 9' by 9'.

Thanks for stopping by! Now I need to get back to quilting. Don't let the door hit you in the rear on the way out! LOL!