Using my Space

Over the past few months, I have been slowly making decisions and working towards a better way to use my space.  I have a spare room that gets used fairly often for guests and kids playing and assorted other things.  It is great to have the room but it isn't a big room.  It has always had trouble being what I needed it to be.  

I haven't been happy having my loom in the spare room at all.  It was meant to be in my living room or in my study.   In the spare room, it didn't get looked at often enough to keep up the urge to weave.  I do want to weave.  I have some specific goals for it in fact but you have to do it if you want to meet specific goals.  The loom needs to be in my study where I very often am.  I have evenings after knitting, that could be used for weaving.  Even if it was only a few rows a day, it would add up with the bonus of filling up the empty hours when I cannot knit. The other thing  about the loom is that while the loom folds up, even when it is warped, and could be stored in a very small space, the loom stand doesn't fold at all.  When guests come, the loom remained a behemoth in the corner of the room.  Goal one or reorganizing space, move loom to the study area.

I desperately needed to get the cutting table out of my room.  With the table set up for sewing, my room becomes a narrow little hallway between piles.  Not really but that is what it feels like.  It also ends up being a flat surface that you see immendiately on entering my room.  I am very familiar with my flat surface problem (as in if it is a flat non-moving surface, it gets covered in stuff) and having a flat surface to put stuff on, in your face on enetering the room?  And then that space underneath a table?  Stuff.  Piles of stuff.  Everywhere till I feel overwhelemed by stuff.    And though I love having a large table to cut fabric on, having this table piled with stuff was making it less likely that I would sew at all.  It always needed a day of putting stuff away before I could do any sewing or prepping to sew.  We all know how I am about cleaning first so... The table stored well enough when it was folded but in my room, having the flat surface, there was just no reason for it to be put away.  Goal two, move cutting table to least likely place for it to turn into a 'flat surface'.  

But more than that.  This house has no where to set up an ironing board.  I generally have been using it in the hallway but trust me, this is a much less than optimal place to have it particularly since the irons cord no longer rewinds into itself.  Tripping over that cord is a disaster calling my name. I desperately need a place to use it where I don't have to worry about hot irons getting knocked over all the time.  It usually is stored in my study, just leaning behind the door. I cannot begin to tell you how much I hated it there.  It was forever falling over.  Goal three, have place to store and set up ironing board and to iron.

I needed room to set and use the carder and stand.  I have never really had a good place for it.  It sometimes sat in my room and sometimes in the lvingroom.  On really rare occasions, such as all of my family coming here for dinner at Christmas, I would stuff it into the spare room closet, but trust me, this was not a good place.  Not at all.  Too much other stuff putting the fine teeth of the carder at risk.

And lastly, my winding station.  It has been sitting in my livingroom for months and it really isn't livingroom material.  It works, but it is a bit battered and beaten.  Small children are forever peering into it and dropping toys there and wanting to play with it.  It needs a place to be when it isn't in use where it can sit with the open side to a wall!

So that is what has been going on the last couple of days.  There has been some moving of big things and making and finding a way to make my space a better place to live in and use and still have it be a place where guests can come and feel welcome and get a good nights sleep.