The Big Clean

 

Not only did I get the stash organized, but I cleaned the whole damn studio. (Well, 85% of it.) It started in this corner, where the return for the central A/C is located. It's getting to be that time of the year, and the heat has kicked on once or twice in recent days, so it was time to cover it up. As long as I was back there I decided to clean the area, and moved everything to do it. I also cleaned the shelf that runs along that wall under the windows.

You know how it is, you get on a roll and keep going.

This was what the studio looked like "Before." Sure, it was nice to work on the stash, but that was the least of my problems. This was late last Thursday.

This is the "After," taken just before midnight on Saturday.

SO much better. At least now my stress level doesn't INCREASE when I walk into the room.

This is good, because I picked up the Peonies Scrap Slab Triangle quilt from the long-arm quilter and now I have room to lay it out and add the binding to it. This quilt has a home, so I have to get it ready to go.

This is the eleventh Scrap Slab quilt I have made, and they are all different, and made from scraps. If you want to use up your scraps, this is a good, fun way to do it. You can get the tutorial here, if you are interested.

Critical Mess

 

I hate it when my studio is messy. It can be a reason to keep me out of it, but more importantly, it makes it hard to work in. AFTER I finished the layout of the Blue Ice (or Ice Blue) quilt, this is what the studio looked like. I had had it.

My friend Buffy sent me an email Saturday morning, did I know VPR was broadcasting "The Marriage of Figaro" starting at 1 PM that day? I did not, but I quickly figured out how to get it, plugged in my iPad, and started to clean the studio as I listened. It took the better part of the day. On Sunday morning  I went back in, and started organizing the mountain of fabric scraps and leftover bits. I just couldn't handle all of it, so some of it went back into the bins to be dealt with another day.

But in the end, I got it to a place I could live with.

I brought out the big vacuum cleaner, moved things around, and gave the room a good vacuum. I even dusted!

So now I can take a deep breath, and when I go in there later to start sewing the Blue Ice* quilt together, I will feel much more at peace than I did a couple of days ago.

*Speaking of which, I looked at my final layout all Saturday afternoon, and all Sunday morning, and I don't think I am going to change anything.

Curtains! Bins! Floors! WFH! Oh My!

I think I have two curtains in my whole house, and one of them covers the door in the studio. I don't need folks peeking into my house, so I put a curtain there.

Those red things are tomato pincushions. The fabric is appropriate, except when I take a picture of anything on my design wall the curtain is distracting, so I have to crop it out. I thought I would make a curtain that was light, creamy and would disappear. I actually did some shopping online, but never got very far. 

In my cleaning I found this, a curtain I had used in the last place I lived. I thought it might work, so I hung it up, and OMG I thought it was the ugliest, plainest, most boring thing I had ever seen. So I took it down and looked over at my stash. CLEARLY I didn't want beige or cream, but I also didn't want anything really really busy.

This is part of a line of fabric I fell in love with, and bought lots of. This is why I generally do not buy fabric I fall in love with. Because I never cut into it and it ends up being a waste of money. I might have had some vague plans for this but they never came to fruition. I think this will make a perfect curtain for the door. It will give me some privacy and it isn't too busy.  Over the next few days or so, I will make the curtain. You know, eventually.


In yesterday's post, you may have noticed that the floor in front of the fabric bookshelf was clear of piles of fabric.

That is because I made an Executive Decision. I decided that it would take me WAY TOO LONG to sort through all that stuff and that I would lose my mind and my patience before I got to the end of it. Most of it is too big for the scrap bins, and too small to fold properly and store in the shelves above.

The bin on the top is full of all the leftover striped triangles from the Zebra quilts, along with all the scraps and strips from making them. The bin in the bottom is full of all the bits that were lying on the floor and cluttering up my cutting table. Now that it has been confined to one bin, I can sit down some day and sort through it and decide if it is worth keeping or not.

The big bin on the top of the bookshelf is all the leftover backing fabric from the quilts I have had quilted. (Yes, I am well aware that is not the best place for it, but storage is at a premium in this house, so this is where it will stay.) That stuff is long pieces of odd sizes that are hard to fold. There's all kinds of good stuff up there.

I got home last night and washed the last two windows, and the shelf, and then cleared the room of everything I could. I even moved the kitty condo. I got everything up off the floor, and let the Roomba (the REAL Roomba) do its thing. Then I put everything back.

NOW, it's clean. I have some backing fabrics I have to iron and get ready for their quilts. I have some other fabric that was draped over an armchair in my living room that needs to get ironed and put away properly. I have to organize the fabric in the bookshelf stash. I have a few other smallish things to do, but now I have room to do them and I won't feel angry or irritated every time I walk into the studio.

In other words, I can relax. I will give you the full tour tomorrow.

Thank you JustGail for complimenting me on showing my messy studio. Except I didn't. I did a lot of picking up and putting away before I took that before picture. It was much worse, and I was very embarrassed.

But I just had to prioritize. I had had readers begging for the Zebra tutorial, and I had some nagging issues I had to resolve before I could write it.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of negative reviews my tutes have received, and those are mostly because they did not read the description that said "these are not paper pieced." It's very important to me that whoever buys one of my tutes has all the information they need to make whatever I am teaching successfully. It takes a TREMENDOUS amount of work, and I had to keep figuring out how to get those great big striped triangles to fit together perfectly no matter who made them. So it was work on figuring that out, and the hell with the way the studio looked. Now that the studio is clean I can move on.

Note I did not say "back to normal." "Normal" for my studio would be somewhat messy, indicating creative work is being done.


One final note. I have been WFH - working from home - since mid March. I learned today I will be continuing to do so for at least another couple of months. In the CEO's words to me in an email I received a few hours ago "...we are being super careful and cautious about looking at everyone individually - health risk wise, extended family situation, particular role you are playing - and creating very tailored solutions on how we run the business and attempt to keep everyone safe. Sounds simple, but clearly not easy. But well worth it, it is the only way to do it."

And folks ask me why I have stayed with this company more than 30 years.

In For a Penny...

One long wall of my studio is all windows. There is a long shelf running along the windows, and my cutting rulers live on that shelf. I looked at it on Sunday morning and all I saw was dust. So I moved them over, and as I started to put them back I decided to clean them. I was amazed at how many of them had dirty edges, so I cleaned them all. Then I cleaned the racks holding them.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

So I moved everything from out from under the cutting table, vacuumed under there (translation: let the Roomba loose) and then cleaned all the stuff back there.

There's a vent in that back corner for the air conditioning, and even pulled it out and cleaned that too.

I also washed these two windows, and I washed the long shelf before I put the stuff back.

I am going to work my way around the room, cleaning EVERYTHING. I've actually started with the hardest and messiest corner, so the rest of the room will be easier.

After a break, and dinner, and the dinner dishes, I cleaned the sewing table and the small cutting table. The rest of the room will be "downhill" from here. And then I'll tackle the fabrics.


Nancy, it never occurred to me that "doodads" was a colloquialism. Doodads are just stuff. This and that. Mostly it's stuff you usually keep in your "junk drawer." Knickknacks, on the other hand, are cutesy little ornamental things that look pretty and collect dust. I do not generally have knickknacks because they occupy space that is better served for something else. And except for babies and little girls and boys, (and maybe some small dogs) I hate, loathe and despise anything "cute." 

Patience Is a Virtue

Patience is a virtue, and I want some right now!

I simply HAVE to wait for my beta testers to work through their process and my editors need time to review the tutorial, so I, and everybody else, has to wait.

Preliminary feedback is very good, so I am able to say quite honestly that this will be worth the wait. You all know how much I love to provide good, useful, and easily understandable instructions. The Zebra quilts are not what you would call "simple." They are actually quite complex, as anybody who makes one will discover. However I think you will find it is worth the wait. As you have seen, these quilts have quite an impact.

I am rather embarrassed to say that I am cleaning the studio, and it was never so messy. I had so much fabric on the floor I can't believe it. As you can see from the photo above, the area around the front of  my design wall is clear. The design wall is empty also. I have stacked the "leftover" big triangles, and I grouped them according to which triangle they are. Makes my life easier.

(by the way, I am struggling with Blogger's new design format, so if things look funky, that's why. It will become default at the end of June so far I am resisting...)

This was the view looking back toward my cutting table last night. See that pile of fabric along the left? It was as high as my knee. There was all kinds of stuff hiding there. I've been stacking what I can on the cutting table at the end of the studio (and the top of the picture). What I can fold I've been putting back in the stash, but I clearly need another solution because

as you can see, the bookshelf is pretty full.

Lies, Lies, Lies!

You really didn't think I could keep my fingers off this thing, did you?

Well, I didn't. I have been tinkering. I tried to make the outside rows look less like dark borders and allow the color on the edges to bump out a bit. I tried to make the corners less like blobs. I have some flat spots, and not as many lively fabrics as I perhaps ought to, but I am good with this. (Yeah, I know, I've only been saying that for the last two weeks.)

This is the view from my cutting table. I have started cleaning up a bit. This also gives you an idea of the scale of the colorwash. It is 20 rows of 2-1/2" squares, so right now it is 50" across, but when it is sewn together it will be 40" square.

The sewing machine table is clear as is my ironing table. As you can see I've got fabric all over the place. I have something like three quilts to bind, but I have to have room to cut strips and pin the binding to the quilt, so I have to clean up. Plus I hate it messy.

By the way, Gail of the boxes of fabric, your green and yellow box of fabrics saved my butt on the colorwash quilt. Have I told you lately how much I love you?

Getting Back to... Normal?

This is the view into my studio from the door. The design wall is at the end of the room on the far right.
 

This is the view looking back towards the house. One big mess. I have to clear off the tables so I have room to work on the next step.
.

 Cherie wanted to know how many squares I started with. I don't have a clue, but these are all the squares I have left over. It's a lot.

I had my dad over to dinner on Sunday night. This is him as he sat in my studio telling me what he thought of the colorwash quilt. I'm pretty sure you can tell he liked it even though you don't get to hear a word he said.

On The Shelf

I think it was at the end of January of this year that I decided to rearrange the fabric in my stash. That didn't work so well. I'd had fabric strewn about the floor of my studio since then. But YESTERDAY, after I ironed all the fabric I had bought over the last couple of months, I put it all away. YAY me!

This picture shows how messy my stash was back in January. The boxes on the floor in front of the bookcases are where I store my class prep stuff. Those got in the way,

So I moved them to the shelf that runs across the top of my studio.

Not ALL the fabric is in the bookcase. In the bin on the left is the fabric I have set aside for the "Oh So Modern" quilt and the one right next to it is all my yellows for the yellow zebra quilt I'll be making after I finish the Not Paper Pieced quilt. Moving on to the right are my class materials for the Barn class that needs to be organized. The bin at the far right contains all the fabric scraps I've gathered from the floor and the work tables. I'll have to sort through those next.

So this is what the studio looks like now, and I am really happy. When the studio gets too messy I can't think, and it's hard to work.

In spite of the mess I have managed to add the binding to the Parade of Zebras quilt, finished The Spring of Teal quilt and prepared the backing for it; and prepared the backing for the Whirlygig quilt. I hope to add the binding to the Magic Carpet (Diamond Colors) quilt. Or is it Geode?

It's a Mess

Contrary to what is shown in this picture, I really do AIM for my wastebaskets when I throw my scraps away.

Most of the time I get it in.

For Gail, who wondered what I do with my failed or dud letters, the answer is I keep everything because sometimes I might be able to reuse them sometime in the future.



I'm getting ready for a talk at the Monadnock Quilter's Guild on Friday night, so I haven't been sewing on the Not Paper Pieced Quilt.

Critical Mess

I never really cleaned the studio after making the Early Autumn quilt, and now I'm sewing up the Whirlygig quilt. It's manageable, but every time I looked at the floor it made me crazy.

 There were thread and fabric bits all over the place, so I cleared out the big stuff and let the robotic vacuum cleaner loose.

This was what it picked up. Wow. Needless to say the studio looks much better now!

Clean-Up

I worked in the sewing studio last night picking up the fabric that was scattered all around and folding all the loose fabric. I'm not done but at least now I can bear to be in the room.

Creativity Is A Messy Business

When I tell you that I go searching through my stash to find fabrics, I am not joking. I am so driven to find the right thing I don't fold the wrong fabric and put it back where it belongs.

 Stopping to clean up would be interfering with the problem solving that's happening.

It's not like I live with anybody who's going to get all worked up about it. That's one of the other advantages of having a sewing studio.

Last week Starsthatblaze asked if I unsewed the mini four patch diamonds if I found they didn't work. The short answer is no. I find it a waste of time. As for larger pieces, I'll keep them, but if I want a part of it, I'll slice the seam away with my rotary cutter. It depends on how desperately I want a particular piece of fabric.

 For those of you who want to know how much of a giant print I buy, the answer is one yard. That will give me enough pattern repeats to cut some interesting diamonds. I can get by with less, but the diamonds aren't that interesting to look at, and you know me. If I'm going to buy a fabric with a giant print, I want to make the most out of it.