Playing Patchwork Shops

I decided at the weekend that I really HAD to tackle the chaos of my sewing area. I'm not lucky enough to have my own studio but I'm very lucky to have an incredibly kind and tolerant husband who doesn't complain about the excessive mess in what should be the dining room area of our open plan living room/dining room.

this is my sewing table underneath the dining room window - I know, you've seen it like this before, and no doubt you'll see it like this again, but it really was getting hard to be creative, especially as my sewing machine is normally squashed on the edge of all the clutter as well.

To get myself motivated I decided to make it into a game and persuaded the children that they would like to play too!! You know, many hands make light work! So we came up with the idea of "playing Patchwork Shops" and I even told them they would get to have some sewing lessons like in a real patchwork shop.

Dot organised the papers into work stuff, patterns, tutorials etc

Fred folded the fabrics that had become piled up on the table

While Daisy sorted out my thread box so it went from this

to this

Unfortunately I soon got bogged down in the nitty-gritty of sorting out the mess and the game evaporated so the children went on to do their own things and I failed to give them a sewing lesson - or even let Daisy iron my fabrics which is what she really wanted to do. Hopefully now that it is tidier we will be able to play the real "shop" part of it next weekend.

I was inspired by this post on Treefall's blog about how Manda has organised her new studio and I have to confess that I have shamelessly copied the idea


and I love it! Even if it did mean that I had to go to IKEA on Sunday! My super clever next door neighbour put it all up for me yesterday morning while I was out and I had a lovely evening arranging all my supplies and tools! Hopefully having less "stuff" on the work surface will make things a lot easier (and tidier?!)

This is a bad photo - but you can see that my table looks a lot better - I just hope it will stay that way


as my craft books were completely overflowing the shelves I decided to store the bulk of them horizontally so they are now organised by size!


And because all my posts lately seem to have been about sock knitting I thought I would leave you today with a photo of a pair of socks knitted by my lovely Mummy

compared with my idea of a "pair" of socks


Lucy xxx

P.S. come back next time to hear about my lovely morning with the gorgeous Helen of BusyBeeStudio (and then you will see the lovely goodies she gave me too!)