Create Where You Are

In my dreams I live in a cozy little cottage. The attic space has been converted into my sewing studio. There's charming slanted ceilings lined with bookcases and baskets for storage. There are skylights that flood the room with natural light. A cutting table that can fit a full yard of fabric on it. Maybe even a comfy chair where I can sit and drink coffee while I dream up new quilt patterns blog rip out mistakes. 

Sadly I don't live in my dreams. I live in a one bedroom apartment with a husband who feels a bedroom is slightly more important than a dedicated sewing studio. Our living room already serves way too many purposes (I successfully snuck in two storage footstools and filled them with yarn for 3 months before my husband found out that I had developed a yarn stash in our living room.) Since the bathroom is very small and windowless the kitchen was the only room left to become my sewing space.

My ironing board gets set up in front of the stove. (Please ignore the pans on the stove. Since I have fabric storage in the kitchen the storage places for pans is those hard to reach places. Pans that get used at least once a week just stay on the stove.)

We added two five-shelf storage racks to the kitchen shortly after getting married. About a year after that I realized that creating was an important part of my personality and I needed to make space for it. I use a lot of pre-cuts which cuts down on scraps. Occasionally I find a really good sale on batting and will hide that in my closet, but otherwise I try to keep my fabric and other items on the shelf. For most of high school and college I was an avid cross-stitcher. I've debated getting rid of the boxes of floss that live in this space, but every time I come close to letting go I make a quilt label and am grateful to have the perfect color of thread.

My space isn't the dream space, but my quilts are the quilts of my dreams. 

I have learned the valuable lesson of creating where I am.