My New Home Studio!

Introduction

Do you ever make decisions about the layout of a new living space thinking “yeah, that’ll work” and then live with those decisions for many months, not realizing that there’s an infinitely better way you could be using the room, until suddenly you come to your senses? Well, that happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

Just over a year ago, my partner Matt and I made a big cross-country move from Chicago (our home for the last 9 years) to Portland, Maine, where, in our new apartment, my sewing/knitting studio space would be shared with our dining room. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very accustomed to having a hybrid studio/dining room. In fact, it has worked well for me in the past, as long as I can figure out how to orient my storage space and surfaces in a way that looks and feels good. For example, in our last Chicago apartment, our dining room was also my sewing/knitting studio and my home office (because pandemic WFH life), and it was totally workable.

That being said, I knew that our new dining room space in Portland was a little smaller than our Chicago dining room, and my new job would require me to work on-site most days, so I wouldn’t need to maintain a home office set-up anymore. Plus, during our last year in Chicago, I had been using my desk less and less for sewing, opting instead to move my sewing machines over to the dining table so I could spread out when working on projects. So before we moved I thought I would not try to cram a separate desk into the studio/dining room, and just use our dining table as my primary making surface when I need it.

So that’s what I did for the first year in our Portland apartment. The dining table was placed near the center of the room, with my couple sets of shelves and boxes for sewing and knitting materials, plus my ironing board, set in a corner. Another corner of the room included a little seating area with our rocking chair (a prized possession from my Nana) for when we want to sit somewhere that’s not the living room. My sewing machine and serger were lugged out onto the dining table when I needed them, and put away on shelves when I was finished with them. Except when I got lazy and/or projects were taking longer than I thought they would. Then I would leave the machines (and maybe some piles of materials) out on the dining table to “encourage” me to finish them in the coming days. And then the dining table wasn’t really used for dining at all.

I’m a very visual person who likes my living spaces to look and feel tidy, even though I have a lot of stuff—which I obviously do, as a creative person who has been sewing and knitting for many years now. So needless to say, after months of that arrangement, it was no longer working for me and I started scheming how to change it for the better.

My hybrid studio-dining room set-up before it was rearranged. Peak messiness!

Rearranging the Room with a Few Furniture Purchases

To change up how I would use the space, I decided to swap the positions of my studio storage and equipment with our auxiliary seating area in the room. Now the seating area and the dining table and chairs are on one side of the room, and my studio space is now consolidated in its own corner on the opposite side of the room. This serves to create more physical and mental separation of these areas for me, which felt necessary. Check and check.

Now, how would I arrange my studio corner? I’m a firm believer in trying to make things work with what you have first before buying new things—furniture, storage, etc.—but in this case I knew that introducing a few key pieces of furniture for my studio corner would greatly improve how the room felt and functioned as a whole.

The main thing is that I realized I did, in fact, need a desk and chair because using the dining table and chairs just were not cutting it for me. I need a space to be able to keep my sewing machines and my laptop out so it’s quicker and easier for me to sit down and use these tools without spending valuable time and energy setting up and breaking down my equipment. That meant I could leave the dining table clear for its actual intended function, and only use it for sewing when I need a cutting station (for garment sewing and quilting), which is much easier to set up and clean up when needed. My only requirements for the desk is that it needed to fit well in the new corner of the room I would use as my studio and that it needed to have a few drawers for storage (more on both of those below).

The other piece of furniture I realized would be helpful is a utility cart for some of my essential sewing supplies, so they would be close at-hand next to my desk, and not taking up valuable shelf or desk space which would be used for other needs. It would house my cutting/marking tools, my iron, pins and clips, thread, my hams, and other miscellaneous notions.

The last thing I decided to purchase for my new studio set-up was a little area rug to help define and designate my space, while also helping to minimize sound transfer for our downstairs neighbor when I’m moving around and running my machines.

For these 4 pieces, I ended up with the IKEA LAGKAPTEN/ALEX desk in brown/black, an ÖRFJÄLL swivel chair in white and olive green, the trusty RASKOG utility cart in this creamy yellow color that nicely complements all the green, blue, and black tones in the space, and the KLASSRUM rug because how could I possibly resist a green and white checkerboard pattern, right? (Side note: I HIGHLY recommend the Maine-based company Sven Delivers for IKEA delivery if you’re in southern Maine or New Hampshire and can’t make the drive all the way to the nearest IKEA in Massachusetts. They were easy and nice to order from, and the delivery was less expensive and more predictable than IKEA’s own home delivery system.)

My new studio set-up, featuring rug, swivel chair, and desk from IKEA.

Now I store my sewing WIPs in my desk drawers for easy access and organization.

My new utility cart filled with sewing supplies and notions, next to boxes where I store some of my fabric scraps (bottom box at left) and my sewing patterns in envelopes (top box).

Our new seating area for hanging out or putting our shoes on before we leave the apartment (hence shoe rack), featuring my beloved Toad & Sew me-made Floyd wall quilt. Clearly Chloe the cat loves it too!

Our new dining room set-up. Love how spacious and tidy this looks now!

Wrap-Up Thoughts

After some months of feeling mildly frustrated with the old studio/dining room set up and ruminating on how I might be able to feel more comfortable in the space, I’m so pleased with the few purchases I made and the new arrangement of the space! Matt loves it as well, since we can both easily use the shared spaces of the dining table and seating area at a moment’s notice, and all of the spaces are easier to keep clean and tidy. I’ve been happily sewing a bit in my new studio corner over the past couple of weeks, and even wrote this blog post while sitting at my new desk. Those are all wins in my book!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments below. Have you made any major or minor rearrangements to your studio spaces that were huge game-changers? Is this giving you any ideas for how you might rethink your current spaces? Tell me below!