Craft Rage

This blog isn't ALL about my crafts, but honestly, when I don't have the opportunity to be creative, I find it really hard to blog about ANYTHING. Since Christmas, my mojo has been missing, not because I haven't been feeling creative, but because my craft room / sewing room has been looking like this;

I wish I could explain how this happened, but I just can't. Well, except I can explain the dog and cat food; we bought bags larger than our storage containers, so what the heck; excess pet food obviously belongs in Rachelle's craft room, right? Thanks, Hotness. :P Unfortunately, I can't really blame him for anything else in there.

As the picture says, that was the room on Saturday morning. On Sunday afternoon (yes, a full day and a half later!!), this is what it looks like;

I noticed a couple of things while I was cleaning out my sewing room. First, I have a nasty habit of buying a minimum of 8 metres of every fabric I purchase. I'm not sure why this is; I'm a large woman, but other than my wedding dress, nothing I make for myself REQUIRES 8m of fabric. I'm not complaining or anything; the extra fabric gives me a bit of wiggle room when I'm working on a project; at least I know I won't run out of anything.

Second, I noticed that my sewing room chair, a full-sized manager's office chair, is completely inappropriate for sewing. Not only is it oversized for the room, but the huge armrests are ALWAYS in the way. So for now, I'm on a folding chair, which is proving to be surprisingly comfortable, and I've been sewing like a fiend for the past few days! I made Pepper a new dog bed for her crate, as well as a pair of shorts for our upcoming trip to Mexico. I'll show those in my next post.

Third, I noticed that I need to keep better track of the Christmas gifts I buy; as I excavated the room, I came up with a few gifts for The Hotness, which I'd purchased, forgotten, and then piled stuff on top of. I should have told him they were Valentines Day gifts, but I'm just not a very good liar.

Labels: sewing room

It's done! It took nearly a week (so much for a simple, one-day project), and the rest of the house has been thoroughly destroyed, but I now have a useable craft/sewing room!

Unfortunately, when I told my fiance over the phone, (he's away with his kinfolk participating in the murder of several hapless deer, an activity which I silently judge, unless I am actually in the passionate throes of wolfing down a large bowl of venison stew), when I told him what I'd done, he paused briefly, then blew out a breath. "Well, that sounds like a lot of work. You... uh... did you forget that we're putting on the extension in the spring?" Oh crap. The extension. And my new, huge, bright Rachelle Room, which I intended to be my craft room.

Oh well, at least I've done a good purge. That's always satisfying enough on its own. And I've organized my little stash (about 200m, nothing compared to some of my sewing heros!) by type and color, into clear plastic bins which will keep everything cat-hair free.

And Smooshy is still alive, and is getting along swimmingly with our other cats, as is evidenced by this picture of her napping in the laundry basket with Joey.

Why did feel such a pressing need to clean up and organize my sewing room, you ask? Well, essentially, after my fiance and I got engaged, I decided to sew my own wedding dress. I knew very clearly what I wanted - a corset topped dress with a full ballgown skirt with big pick-ups, preferably non-white, with a scattering of beads. Something like this:

The problem is, as I have mentioned earlier, I have no sewing skills. No technical skills. But a lot of heart, which has to count for something, right?

Anyway, I bought a bunch of junk fabric and made a mock-up, just hand-sewn and draped on myself (thank heavens for closed doors, because if my fiance had seen me contorting and prancing around trying to drape and pin on myself, he might have packed a bag and left me) and was pretty pleased with the result - I achieved the right overall effect of the pickups on the skirt, and did a mock-up of the corset based on a duct-tape pattern, which worked out much better than I thought it might, all things considered.

The thing was, I couldn't really get the whole outfit put together right, because I needed a dress dummy to help out while I toyed with the pickups on the skirt. So I found a good used one on kijiji.ca, and brought her home, only to discover that I really had no room for her. So in actuality, I just spent a week tearing my house apart and putting it back together so I could make a home for my dress dummy. On some level, that makes me very, very sad.

And also, I guess the second reason I did it is because my fiance bought me a serger two months ago, and due to the extreme disarray in my sewing room, I had nowhere to unpack it, because my other six sewing machines were scattered all over the rest of the room. So my ultimate reward for getting this project finished is that now I'm going to go and learn how to use this scary beast;

I suppose it's really not all that scary, for those of you who have used one before. But frankly, I'm new to all this, and I'm pretty intimidated. Wish me luck!

Labels: sewing room

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. I am an idiot. This was the dumbest idea I've ever had. This, dear reader (assuming there's someone reading this other than me, which there probably isn't, because who wants to read the blog of a jackass who's chock full of dumb ideas and can only write in run-on sentences), is an idea strained through the Crap Sieve. A perfectly great notion - gosh, I wish I had more space, turned into a small slice of the seventh circle of hell - let's completely swap two rooms, but not empty them first - we'll just move things from room to room one lousy piece of shit item at a time. My new craft room floor is layered with about six inches of junk I should never have kept. I'm writing this post in order to avoid the inevitable horror of sifting through it all.

Plus, I stepped on Smooshy. She's fine - in reality, I felt her fur with my foot before I put any weight on her at all - but really, it could have gone very badly. So once again, I can only look at the bright side. I still have four live cats in the house. Which reminds me, I need to clean the litter boxes. Maybe I'll do that instead of going back to my sewing room.

Labels: sewing room, smooshy

This sucks. This really, really sucks. I lament this crazy idea of swapping rooms between my office and craft room. What was I thinking? Did I really need the extra ten feet of space in my craft room? Why does it look like this now?

I think my soul just died a little bit.

I keep thinking - "It's worth it, it's worth it - you'll have access to all of your machines, you'll be able to put your stupid dress on your stupid dressform, you'll be able to dance a jig and twirl in circles singing 'This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!'"

Cripes. Who needs a jig. And I frigging hate that song anyway.

On the happy side, Smooshy is still Smooshy, not Unspeakable Stain. Sort of a bad news/good news type of thing!

Labels: sewing room, smooshy

So I ended the last post saying that I'd be cleaning up my sewing room. As it turns out, I lied.

Not only did I NOT clean up my room, I actually made it worse. There's a method to my madness, though. Either I'll make such a terrible mess that the Punishment Fairies my mother warned me about will come and take away all my lovely fabric, or I'll be moving everything from my smallish craft room (8' x 7') to my larger (10' x 7.5') office.

I don't really need very much floor space in my office - it's only my desk and all my assorted printer tables and filing cabinets, however, I need as much floor space as I can get for my sewing room, because I have a sewing cabinet, a large folding cutting table, a dress form, and nine hundred thousand million clear plastic totes full of fabric. Okay, maybe not nine hundred thousand million, but lots.

The reason for the move is scary/exciting. You see, I went ahead and fulfilled Johnny Paycheck's dream, and told my boss to Take This Job And Shove It. Well, realistically, I was more polite than that, and I even gave two week's notice, because I'm only a little bit of a jerk, not a total jerk.

In any event, I need to completely reorganize my office and clear out all the sewing stuff that's taken up residence in the larger room. Since there's actually no room for it elsewhere, I'm going to consolidate all office stuff in the room that used to be my sewing room, and all my sewing stuff in my old office. And boy, are you ever bored with my oversharing!

Anyway, I'm going to do the complete swap tomorrow. With any luck, I will not drop another sewing machine on my foot (won't matter, I'm wearing steel toed boots just in case), I will not set the house on fire, and I will not accidentally step on my new kitten. Of course, I made a bunch of promises at the end of the last post and they didn't turn out so well. We'll see!

In the meantime, meet Smooshy the Kitten, who will hopefully make it through tomorrow without a name change to "That Strange Stain On The Carpet By The Sewing Room"!

Labels: sewing room, smooshy