Blog #1 - My First Blog & Sewing Room Tour

Welcome to my sewing room in Beaufort, South Carolina!  My first love is garment sewing; however I do quilt (as you can see by the project on the cutting table when I took these pictures) and knit.  

I am very lucky to have a large space with great light overlooking moss covered live oak trees in our low country neighborhood.  

The previous owner of our house was an artist and my sewing room was her studio.  The built in cabinets and large table top were hers.  What an excellent cutting space this table top has become!  The plastic drawers under the cutting table surface serve two purposes – they are 39 inches tall, the perfect cutting height for me, and they hold my fairly extensive yarn collection. 

In this next picture, you can see my apparel fabric collection in an IKEA shelving unit that is popular for holding fabric.  In the closet I have tucked away my quilting fabrics.

Do you see the nut & bolt cabinet in the picture below?  It was a gift from my Mom when we moved down here…what a great way to organize all my sewing notions!  104 drawers I believe – mostly triangle shaped drawers in the rotating top you can see in the picture.  She misses it in her sewing room for sure, but putting it on the moving van made sense at the time. (The fact that we moved her down here near us a year ago, doesn’t mean that the nut & bolt cabinet moved back to her sewing room – this thing is heavy!).  However, she comes over to sew and enjoys it here too.

I’ve been sewing clothes since junior high with my sewing machine back to back with my Mom’s.  She called it self-defense sewing – I either wore what she made me, or made my own clothes.  So I did.

Since I’m retired now, my wardrobe is much more casual than my past corporate wardrobe.  Just fun comfortable clothes. 

I love black & white, and bright colors with stripes, solids and graphic prints.

I joined Instagram a little over a year ago, and fell in love with following other sewists & knitters (I’ll talk more about knitting in a later post).  From Instagram, I discovered sewing podcasts and uTube video podcasts.  I’ve been listening to knitting podcasts for years.

I am very inspired by much of what I’ve seen from other sewists.  Most recently by – Whitney from TomKatStichery (she has a great focus on sewing collections), Heather Lou from Closet Case Patterns & her Rome Collection ISGTV capsule wardrobe post (so fun!), and other recent capsule wardrobe posts.

While we primarily live in South Carolina, we also have a small apartment in downtown Chicago.  We spent weekends in Chicago while working in central Illinois, and just couldn’t give up the city entirely.  We spend on average one week a month in Chicago.  Up to this point, I’ve been taking a suitcase to & from each month – a large suitcase because you never know what the weather will be by the lakefront in Chicago! I’m tired of lugging that suitcase (although really I have to admit my husband does much of that). 

So my next blog will be about planning a Chicago capsule wardrobe.  Not a small one necessarily – weather changes and many activities mean (at least for me) a variety of clothes.  I’ll start with a late Spring/Summer/early Fall wardrobe.  The colder months in Chicago will require a very different set of clothing.

I hope you enjoyed reading my first blog.  If not, I’m sure I’ll be a better blogger as time goes on.  Bye for now!

Barbara

You can find me as sewBknit on Instagram and in Raverly