Do you need a little inspiration for arranging your sewing room or studio?
Sewing.org is running an ongoing reader challenge to share your sewing room with the world.  You can browse through photos of sewing rooms and studios – and even submit your own sewing room!
I’m not sure if I’m willing to submit my sewing room to that kind of scrutiny at the moment…  Of course – it could be a good way to inspire a good studio clean
image: Stock.xchg

I’m getting back into my normal schedule of studio life and teaching after December’s excitement and energy.  I definitely need to spend some time getting my studio and fabric storage area cleaned and tidied again.  I seem to have the habit of pulling fabric out, looking for inspiration… and then leaving it out.  Ah, the joys of being a visual person
I ran a month-long series on Tangled Thread during March and April last year called the “De-Stash Challenge“.  If you’re looking for ideas on how to de-stash and de-clutter your own sewing room, the series is worth checking …read more

Well, we’re five days into the New Year.  Is there a new technique you want to learn this year?  Enter a competition?  Or just finish that project that’s been hanging around waaaay too long?  How about making New Year’s resolutions for your studio?
Here are a few ideas to get you started… feel free to add more ideas as comments!
This year I resolve to:

Maintain my sewing machine (ei change needles regularly, clean it, oil and it take it into the dealership for tune-ups)
Learn a new stitch – once a week, once a month – whatever works for you.
Take photos of everything …read more

In a perfect world, every fiber artist would have a big, well-lit studio, complete with natural light, sinks, electrical plug-ins where ever we need them, custom-made sewing, cutting, ironing and work tables…
But since this isn’t a perfect world, and my fabric has to live in a separate room from my sewing machine – let’s talk about some options!
I used to cut out fabric on the floor.
In a house with five dogs, several birds and a variable number of cats.
It got a little frustrating when one of the dogs would run across a fragile paper pattern, or the cat dived head-first …read more

The night-blooming cereus decided to grace my studio with not one, but three blooms last night!
Unfortunately, I was teaching for most of the evening, so here’s what they looked like just before I left:

And then the full bloom after the sun had set:

I definitely think there is a piece of embroidered fiber art in there
all images are copyright C Findlay-Harder and may not be reproduced or reused in any fashion.

It seems that seamstresses and fiber artists quite often have issues with setting up their sewing rooms & work areas… how often have you gotten up out of your sewing chair with an aching back?  Or does your ironing board leave you with sore knees?
I know my cutting table is about 8 inches too short for me – boy, does that hurt after a couple hours of cutting fabric!
Tami, from Lemon Tree Tales has written an excellent article on how to set up your sewing room in a way that won’t hurt your body.
It’s definitely worth checking out!

I’m so excited – my night-blooming cereus looks like it may have several blossoms tonight!

It certainly inspires me to get my sketch book out and start planning a piece of fiber art based on the flowers I think painting the background and then using wool or silk fibers and fabric to form the blooms…
all images are copyright C Findlay-Harder and may not be reproduced or reused in any fashion.

The Lifestyles channel is participating in a channel-wide challenge (boy, try saying that three times fast!) called “A View From My Window”.
I’m not sharing my window (you guys got to see that quite recently anyhow), but I am sharing what’s growing in my window.  I posted these photos last year, when I had three buds on my night-blooming cereus.
Well, this year I have ten flower buds!

That’s a close-up of two of the buds… and here’s a close-up of one of the single ones:

The buds are tiny now, but in a few weeks they’ll be inches across!  I’m going to try …read more

Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday – I had a glass light fixture fall off the ceiling in my studio!  Luckily I wasn’t in my studio at the time, but it made a heck of a racket and I have glass shards in boxes of fabric, on the floor and sprinkled onto my books.  Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy and it cut short my studio time…  I’ll have more of the silk paper tutorial a little later this afternoon, but for now I’ve got a challenge from another b5media blogger:
Peggy, from Tree Hugging Family has issued a …read more

The Lifestyles channel is sharing our offices & blogging locations over the next couple of days.
I normally write in the mornings, in my studio/office… after the coffee has time to reach my neurons and wake me up Here’s what the view is like from my studio window, which is right next my computer desk:

I’ve got a night blooming cereus, two hoya plants (in bloom right now – they smell amazing at night) and a jade plant that somehow colonized a little corner of one of the other plant pots. The plants screen out the intense …read more