I know I’m lucky to have a room, with a door, just for my sewing. In previous years I sewed in a family room, a dining room, in my bedroom and in the basement. It truly is a luxury to be able to keep all my tools out where I can easily find them. To leave my half done project on the table and to have a table at a decent height for cutting on. And yet this “I’m so lucky” attitude is working against me.
I’ll explain. Many people have a home office. Even people who have an office outside their home have a home office. Do they think they’re so lucky to have that office? No. They think; I need this office. It helps me make a living. It is my space to do my work. I’m a professional and I need a professional space.
Me? I’m thinking; I’m so lucky that I just need to accept this gift space as it is and just be grateful. Why? My husband didn’t live with the peach walls and orange plaid carpet in his office. We painted the walls, made desks, hung art work and laid neutral carpet over that mess.
You know that broken window theory, right? Once one window in a house becomes broken then what does it matter if I break another. Or even a third. Before you know it the house is completely run down. By the way, this is also true for piles on the dining room table, dirty dishes in the sink and clothes on the bedroom floor. So my sewing room has become a mess. It has been my sewing room for five years now and still the walls are an awful shade of what I call “army hospital green” (the interiors of the army hospitals when I was growing up. Maybe once in fashion but never appealing and conjuring up only bad memories for me). Things are beginning to pile up; empty cardboard boxes, paints that belong upstairs, papers from work that belong at work, and things that actually belong in the sewing room but not in the space they currently occupy. Add to that the visual clutter no sewing room can escape and I find my space commanding no respect, definitely not inspiring, and sometimes depressing. What I find amazing is that I was okay with working around and in all this mess but not really because I kept avoiding going in there. I found other things to do that I rationalized as more important. However, deep down, very little is more important than the work you were meant to do and although I may not save the planet with my needle and thread I will be a happier and a better person if I can create.
So this is it. I’m clearing it out. I’m painting the walls and figuring out what I already have in the house that I can steal for use in my sewing room to make the room more inspiring. To make it more functional. To make me take it more seriously. To stop giving me an excuse to stay away from it.
At first I thought this was too self indulgent of a subject to write about but if you sew you need to make that sewing space a place of your own and a place of respect so everyone you live with knows when you’re there, you’re busy doing something important and it’s not a play room or a junk room. It isn’t just, “that’s sweet, she has a domestic hobby.” Sew-ers, grab your scissors and take charge!