I have finally finished decorating my new craft room - every surface has been painted or polished and even the floor has had a fresh coat of varnish.
One of the messiest jobs was re-blacking and polishing the fireplace but it looks very smart now.
I have tried and tired to work out what furniture to get for the room but just can't get my head found it. This sort of thinking is too complicated for my Covid brain. So ... I have done this ...
Each of these pieces of folded sheets of newspaper, cut and stuck together, represents a different set of shelves or table or whatever. Some of them I already have and some are things that I could buy. My daughter is coming to help me this weekend and we're going to arrange them around the room in different combinations to help me see what will fit where.
One of the things I need to store in this room is my Mum's large collection of quilting fabric. And when I say large ...
This is just some of it, squeezed on to the top landing while I was still painting. It's taken me weeks and weeks to go through it all and decide what to keep and how to fit it into as many of Mum's baskets as possible. There has been an awful lot of folding and ironing. Which is where the title of this post comes in. This is what 53 baskets of fabric looks like.
I keep telling myself that Mum fitted all this into a craft room less than half the size of mine but it does look an awful lot on the floor like that. There are baskets full of scraps on the top landing too; I'm going to cut these into useable shapes and strips gradually before they're allowed into the room.
I have the two sets of shelves that Mum stored the baskets on and we're hoping to re-assemble them and get them in the room this weekend. Anything bigger than a small bookcase has to be taken apart to get it up my narrow staircases and then put back together again upstairs.
The only other things in the room so far are two chairs.
One is an old kitchen chair that must be over fifty years old; we certainly had it when I was little. As you can see, it's got somewhat paint spattered over the years; every so often I re-cover the seat with new fabric. The other one is my tatty old black office chair - very comfortable but not really me.
So, armed with my trusty staple gun and two pieces of Mum's fabric, I turned them into pretty chairs, worthy of a new room.
The back cushion on the office chair was very simple to do. I just used a metal paint scraper to poke all the excess fabric in between the two layer of the plastic frame. I started off with a big square of fabric and didn't even bother cutting it to shape.
I'll report back once we've started putting furniture in the room. It will be nice to be able to actually use it eventually. The thing about creating a craft room is it doesn't leave you any time to actually do your crafts ...
