Updating the Sweat Shop

The hubs bought me a quilting frame that I can use with my day-to-day machine, but will give me the flexibility of a big, long-arm machine for Christmas.  I'm very excited about it, but the layout of the sweat shop was not very conducive to using this new, fun tool.  The hubs wanted to get me a new long table, so yesterday we went looking.  Something you should know about me is I hate thrift stores and garage sales. I just don't really want to sort through other people's crap, but I also knew it'd be the best place to look for a good wood table.

We went to two thrift shops and one Goodwill place without any luck. We talked about it and I wanted to check the local Habitat for Humanity's ReStore before heading home.  If we didn't find anything there, we would go home and regroup (do research and find more stores). We stopped and they had three tables that were just about perfect, but I wasn't sure they'd fit in the tiny room.  So we agreed to run home and take some measurements (Why didn't we do that before we left?), sadly, by the time we got back, one of the tables had been sold. So we snapped up the remaining two. 

After getting them home, I tried rearranging the furniture, but was getting frustrated because stuff was not working right. So, I left for the night and brought my graphing paper and measurements with me. I sketched it out and figured out what would work in the 9x11 room.  The drawing on the left is what was in the room and the right is how it is now. My sewing U is facing the double window.

These are from the door.

                               

The tables we bought (for $25 total!) are from a hotel renovation (we think).  They each have a single drawer and a space for plugs - although, only one still has the plug, but that suits my layout perfectly!

Because it means I am FINALLY able to unpack this beaut!

I am so happy to have two cutting spaces, a new place for my serger, and plenty of room for my new quilting frame.

What I've been up to...

Did you notice the new header? I've been playing around with Picmonkey and created two new headers (one for each blog).

I'll be honest, not much of my time has been spent in the sweat shop.  I just don't have time to spend there.  The semester is bad enough, but October is a little ridiculous with deadlines.  Combine that with a week's worth of freezes which meant we had 5 huge boxes of green tomatoes to process and a long table of partially ripened tomatoes.  So the last couple of weekends, we've spent making green salsa, beet relish, pepper jellies, mustard, etc.

Drying tomatoes

Canning - half of this is green salsa!

Last week, we bought a couple cheap bookcases for the dining room and I thought I should get a bigger one for the sweat shop.  You can see here that I had completely outgrown the one I had there. The plan was to move this smaller one to the bedroom for nick-knacks and bedtime readings after I had cleaned out all the totes of clothes.

Old bookcase

 The hubs put the new one together and the following day I switched the bookcases.  This looks much nicer, no?

New bookcase

The top shelf has a few marketing/business books about growing a craft business (obviously that's been placed on hold), half pint jars full of safety pins and buttons, business cards, and sewing patterns.  The black basket on the next shelf holds my quilting and purse patterns. There's also a jar of taffy and a couple of Christmas books.  Then there's quilting magazines, then the quilting books, and finally, the crochet and cross-stitch books.  I'm quite pleased with it.