This is my total mess of a sewing area. Or, at least, most of it is. In the far back of the picture is more storage (mostly DD2's stuff she hasn't moved to her current residence or gotten rid of) than sewing area, but it's still kinda in my line of sight when I'm trying to sew. I'm posting this picture from the very start of September, as I'm hoping to use National Sewing Month to get 15 (or more!) minutes in my sewing area every day of this month and will (hopefully) be able to take a picture of a much less cluttered, much more usable space on September 30th.
Let's see how I did the first seven days:
September 1, I repaired the Poetess's fly mask that is laying over the back of the chair at my sewing machine. It had several tears in the ears that needed to be hand stitched closed.
September 2, I sewed up the holes in the toes of a couple of DH's black dress socks. That only took about five minutes, so I used the rest of my 15 to start putting some things away. Like scrap flannel from the nightgowns I made K3 and Faline last December. And knitting and sewing patterns that were also laying out from the same time frame. I also put a bag of free yarn of several weights, but mostly worsted, that my Mom had given me last fall, into the bin I have for worsted weight yarn.
September 3, I cleaned off a corner of my cutting table and filed away more quilting/sewing patterns as well as threw away the little tags that had been on each square of a quilt block swap I'd participated in back in the early two-thousand-teens. A couple of years ago I had sewn those blocks into a twin-sized quilt top, which still awaits sandwiching, pin basting, and quilting (all the components for this take up yet another spot on the cutting table 😒).
Also included in this 15 minutes was sorting out the contents of a cardboard box of DH's grandma's quilting related things that Mother-in-Law had sent to me sometime during the overwhelming years of the mid-to-late twenty-teens. Inside the box I found lots of fabric marking pencils and spools of thread, a leather thimble, some labels that proclaimed "Specially Made by Ethel" (huh? Who was Ethel? Grandma's name was not Ethel. Nor was her middle name Ethel.), and best of all, a bunch of hexies in what looks to be 60's or early 70's fabrics!!
September 4, I used the sewing machine for the first time since early January!! I mended a seam on a (new, but washed) cloth diaper I had from a pack I bought several years ago to make baby burp cloths out of (Faline, Buck, Sixlet, Lucky, Octavia) and hadn't used this one yet because one of the center seams on one side had come unstitched during the washing process. Now it's fixed and ready to be used for a future baby's burp cloth when the time comes to make more!
I also fixed an inch-long section of a waistline seam on a dress I'd made a long, long time ago that both DD1 and DD2 wore as little girls. I recently pulled it out of a tote of special things I'd been saving, ran it through the washing machine to freshen it up, and am planning on passing it along to Faline now that she's about the same size. With my remaining handful of minutes I did a little more cleaning up of the tables that hold my sewing machine, rotary cutting mat, rulers, templates, etc. I'm getting the itch to work on a real project, not just mending (although there's more mending waiting. . . )
September 5, I didn't get to the sewing area until late in the day, after dark. I did some more tidying, especially of small fabric scraps that went into a bin of really tiny saved stuff for paper piecing or string quilting. In the process, I found the shoebox sized plastic container where I keep my leftover binding strips (mainly in case I need to repair binding on a grandkid quilt in the future). Hooray! I had binding strips from three baby quilts to add to it, and had been keeping my eye out for it all week when tidying up.
September 6, A little mending with the sewing machine, and more tidying. Put away larger leftover fabric pieces that were stacked up, each color going into the appropriate bin (bins stashed under the tables). Put away yet more sewing patterns that were also still out from Christmas sewing last year.
September 7, The sewing area is looking less like a mess compared to at the beginning of the month. So much so that I can actually use a large portion of my 'cutting table', so I did. I had found, in my tidying over the week, a fleece 'blanket' that DD2 had brought to me several years ago. She had intended to make a tied fleece blanket, but when she started to tie it, several of the fringe pieces broke off. Frustrated, she had given it to me, basically saying she couldn't make it work, and to do with it what I wished. Well, at the time, I had a ton of stuff going on and so I folded up the two pieces of fleece, partially tied on one side, and set it aside. Over time, it got moved here and there, and buried under stuff.
Now that I had found it, I looked at it again, decided that for whatever reason the particular fleece fabric used just wasn't going to work for making a tied blanket where you cut fringes in the sides and then tie top and bottom together with the fringes. Rather than getting hung up on the why it wasn't working for that/how to make it work, I decided I could make a tied blanket of a different type with it. Both layers were still lined up with each other, so I laid them out on my now sorta usable cutting table, smoothed the layers, and pin basted them together. My intention is to use embroidery floss at regular intervals sewn through both layers and then tied into knots as you would if you were tying a quilt rather than quilting it. Once that's done I'll sew around all four edges and call it a finished and usable blanket.
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