Recently I've been pretty occupied with planning a special event for My Quilt Guild Westside Quilters "An Evening with Kaffe Fassett" on here in Los Angeles on Monday September 26th. Yes, tickets are still available at www.Westsidequilterslosangeles.org! (Forgive the shameless plug...) so some of my projects have been put on the back burner.  But a  few could not wait – namely the baby quilt for a friend’s new grandson due next month and my son’s 21^st birthday quilt due three months ago! I’ve been trying to make time to sew and every time I do I’m so grateful that earlier this year I took a weekend to do some re-organization in my Studio,

I call it “The Studio” but it is actually a tiny 9ft.  X 8 ft. lean-to shed on the back of our garage. In the 50s it was a kids playhouse dubbed “Ft. Apache” (remember Rin Tin Tin? Or are you all too young...) and when we moved in it became a place to put our son’s spinet piano.  When the piano was replaced by an electric guitar I took it over as my sewing room and it has now been officially named “The Studio” because that’s what the beautifully lettered slate sign my husband made for me a few Christmases ago says.

Because of its size, organization is key.  For a long time my fabric stash was in large plastic bins, but as the stash grew they got heavier and more unwieldy and I would go out to buy more fabric for a project rather than get into those stacked up bins to find what I had.  That is a thing of the past with my new purchases this summer at The Container Store of a stackable set of 8 large plastic pull out drawers (see above). I spent two days sorting out the hand dyes and batiks by color, folding them and placing it all in these drawers now carefully marked with their colors with my P-Touch (my Martha Stewart moment).  The drawers are clear so I can easily see what’s in them.  The fabric is folded, and the edges are all visible. I’ve found some treasures I forgot I had.
 
Two other purchases have also made my quilting life so much easier - a clear plastic hanging shoe bag - the kind with many pouches for shoes that hangs on the back of a door (at left) and a clear plastic hanging purse organizer (below), both purchased in the closet department at Bed Bath and Beyond for very little.  The shoe pouches are perfect for organizing small fabric scraps according to color and the handbag organizer hangs on the wall and allows me to slide in many rolls of embroidery stabilizer, interfacing, freezer paper and parchment freeing up a couple of drawers I desperately needed for other supplies. 
 

Here’s a challenge – I’ve found some very ordinary things to make organize my sewing space and make my life easier, so let me challenge you to do the same. Anyone with space saving or organizational ideas that are working for them, send them and I'll post them on the blog. Let’s share more ideas.