Setting up the Studio

These shelves are Billys from IKEA and they are about 13 years old and showing some wear, after five moves! But I can still use them and will be filling them with fabric, beads, polymer clay, painted papers for collage, and tools. The studio footprint is quite small and there are too many things I feel I need to have at my fingertips, so that caused a dilemma. What can I eliminate or rehome in the garage or another closet? 

When I go to sleep I focus on a problem for my unconscious mind to figure out and this idea came to me and almost made me get out of bed to see if it worked.

 The bedroom closet could be filled with stuff and that would get it out of the way, but what stuff needed to be in there? 

 The magnificent solution! The sewing machine could go in there! Wha? Well, a while back I blogged that I wouldn't be making any more quilts, but what I should have said was that I wouldn't be making anymore big bed quilts. Instead I will be returning to small fused quilts, which require minimal quilting, so why have the presence of the machine filling up the space? Should I want to tackle some home dec or garment sewing, the machine is quite easy to roll out of the closet and not miss a beat. It is quite usable right where it sits, and even has great overhead lighting in the closet, as well as my rod light. My chair on wheels can be slid into place and I am ready for action.

So onto the next dilemma: I store all my fused fabric in rolls and I need a solution for keeping them that would make it easy to find the fabric I need to use for the current project. In the past I had a whole chest of drawers for the vast amounts of rolls that are in my stash. Now that chest of drawers is being used for Dave's clothes in our bedroom. I certainly don't find working out of these Rubbermaid tubs to be optimal and so what will do the trick for this smaller studio space?

 

 Here's  my solution! A shoe rack of all things. This particular one is just the right size width for my rolls which are 17" wide. I figure I will have a shelf for each color family and several for the few fused prints I do use these days. The rack depth is 11" which corresponds to the depth of the Billys, so it won't stick out and disturb my latent OCD. The height is 57" which is great because I can easily reach the top without a step stool. And I could split it in half and make two shelves systems of four shelves each if I ever desired. 

I have to wait for the rack to be delivered on Wednesday from Amazon, so I'll show the results then. 

Next dilemma: Scraps. 

Solution: Sterlite plastic containers which fit exactly on the Billys 14" wide shelves.

I already had several but realized I needed more of this specific configuration and had to hunt them down, finally finding them at Home Depot. 

Now I realize that this is not going to be of much help to you unless your are also a committed artistic fuser (or an artist that needs to be committed), but since you are riding along with me on this journey, I figure you might want to know what works for me.