Runaway October

Or the S.M.O.R as I like to call it — The Sewing Machines Oper­a­tions Room.

Remem­ber this sorry lit­tle 11’x11’ room?

Which was later cleaned and some­what orga­nized to look like this:

Well, it’s kind of fin­ished now. It’s now a very work­able space and I can actu­ally com­plete projects some­where other than the kitchen table. YAY!

I took at least 100 pic­tures today, and about 20 a few weeks ago. This room is very very hard to photograph.

I even tried to take a video with my fancy new Flip Video Cam­corder from my Prilosec spon­sor­ship, but it eats bat­ter­ies like no other.

Of course I couldn’t find any bat­ter­ies to replace them with.

Such is the life of a mom.

The project table is com­pletely hand­made by me and my dad. We used plans from Knock Off Wood. Here’s the top and the cubby sides.

I’ll go into it in a lit­tle more detail later.

I’ll have to slowly buy or make some pretty bas­kets on con­tain­ers to go in here.

Love these stools from Overstock.com

Hand­made string balls made by one of the boys.

There was two.

One of them bit the dust, or rather, the dogs water bowl.

The string ball, not the boys.

Well, okay, they usu­ally assault the water bowl at least once a day, but they don’t melt.

Unless you count the dirt that melts off.

I should make some more. String Balls, not boys. Maybe a lit­tle girl but that’s a dif­fer­ent sub­ject.

Now maybe I can get these bad boys quilted and bound and in use.

And what craft room photo shoot is com­plete with­out a pic­ture of a cat.

I used Martha Stew­art Hydrangea flat paint for the walls. I also painted the ceil­ing and all the trim, but can’t find the names of them. They’re the same ones that were rec­om­mended on the paint chip palette. No wor­ries about every­thing match­ing together. What a smart girl, eh?

I can’t seem to find a decent sam­ple color online, so you’ll just have to squint and imag­ine you can tell the true color of everything.

I do hope to make some roman blinds or cur­tains for the win­dows. And the bas­kets I men­tioned ear­lier. I def­i­nitely need some art­work and other pret­ties to hang up and keep me happy while I work. I would really really love a stereo or MP3 player of some sort in there too. I work so much bet­ter with music.

So, that’s the S.M.O.R.

What do you think?

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I have a really bad habit of doing noth­ing dur­ing the sum­mer. You might have noticed that the heat is a cen­tral part of my last cou­ple posts.

It’s really a cen­tral part of our lives from May­ish to Augustish. Even in the house it’s just too easy to veg out and keep cool.

BUT! I have done some stuff lately. I swear. I have proof!

I made this clock for my brother a while back, for his birthday.

It’s pretty hard to pho­to­graph this, but oh well. I got lucky enough that a local BMX shop gave me the chain­ring, after I offered to buy one. Funny enough they had a sim­i­lar clock dis­played in their front window.

The tuto­r­ial is here. Mine is not nearly as cool, but hey I was work­ing with what I had.

I also made a cover for my sewing machine. I fig­ured that plas­tic one it came with wasn’t good enough for the new craft room. (More on that soon.) Also, the melted hole in it from the iron didn’t help any.

I just used the dimen­sions from the old cover, plus seam allowances, and threw together a rec­tan­gle with ties on it. I backed it with flan­nel, because it seemed like the thing to do. Isn’t that fab­ric gor­geous? I got it on a whim at a local mill end store. Kick­ing myself for not buy­ing more.

Sewing Machine Cover tutorials:

• Sparkle Power! — This is pretty much exactly what I did.
• Sew Inspired
• Chez Lars­son

Last, but not least, a new iron­ing board cover. I love mak­ing these things. It makes me actu­ally want to iron. Yuck.

This is also more fab­ric I picked up on a whim. This time from IKEA. Their uphol­stery fab­ric is the per­fect length from reg­u­lar iron­ing boards.

I always leave the old cov­ers on, for padding. Some­times I’ll throw a layer of fleece in between too if I have big enough scraps.

Here are a cou­ple iron­ing board cover tutorials:

• Stop Star­ing and Start Sewing
• Clear­ly­tan­gled
• Com­muning with Fabric

That’s it for now. I hope to have more soon. I ordered some good­ies.

What are you work­ing on lately, or do you have any inter­est­ing tuto­ri­als to share?

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Julia at Hooked On Houses started a new Linky. I love Linkys. They’re a great way to find infor­ma­tion in one gen­eral post, or share a great idea or pro­mote your blog. Prob­lem is I never seem to have any­thing worth linking.

When she pro­posed Freaky Houses I instantly thought of some of the houses we saw in our house hunt­ing days. Man, what WERE those peo­ple think­ing? But then I real­ized I could use some help.

While not really freaky, my loft is… well, help­less is how I would describe it most days.

This is what up see upon com­ing up the stairs. Notice the blank, the bland, the blah. The main pur­pose of this room is a media room. Sus­pended from the ceil­ing is a pro­jecter which shines on the screen that’s rolled up in the above picture.

Stand­ing at the top of the stairs, here’s the view to your left. That sad lit­tle shelf there had good inten­tions. At the time, we needed some­thing super cheap yet strong enough to hold a receiver and a cou­ple game con­soles. Matt and his dad made the shelf, which IS super strong, but there was a mea­sure­ment mishap. Not every­thing fits. AND none of the cords are really con­cealed. Huu­uggee pet peeve of mine.

Con­tin­u­ing to the left we have our behe­moth couch. You see no laun­dry. –Jedi Mind Trick ges­ture– It was pur­chased for our old house. Max­i­mum seat­ing and small price point were the cause behind this one. It seems very over­whelm­ing, which is sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the room is about 20′ x 15′. End table and cof­fee table need to be refin­ished but wait­ing on that until I have a sense of the room.

This is the view basi­cally stand­ing under the ill-fated shelf. Down the hall­way to the left is laun­dry, craft room, kids bed­room and a bath­room. The door to the right is the mas­ter bed­room. That cord should be gone as soon as we get our deliv­ery from NewEgg.com this week.

Here’s a cou­ple panora­mas. Click for larger versions.

Nor­mally I would define a few seat­ing areas, throw some rugs and call it done-ish, but there are some spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tions here. It needs to be able to be as dark as pos­si­ble in the mid­dle of the day; due to the pro­jec­tor, noth­ing can block your view of the screen and the media devices need to stay close to where the shelf is. They’re hard wired in and out of reach of small people.

This is the screen in full down posi­tion. It’s about 2′ from the ground and maybe 3′ from the right wall. That makes it really hard to put any­thing seat­ing wise along that right wall. I do have a futon that was given to us that would fit, but watch­ing the screen from it would be uncom­fort­able. And, let’s face it, futons typ­i­cally ain’t cute. The paint color is from the pre­vi­ous own­ers, so no need to keep it, per se.

I don’t nec­es­sar­ily have a bud­get, or a gen­eral time frame but a fresh set of eyes on this would be nice. If I know what I want I can start keep­ing an eye out at swap-meets, thrift stores, etc.

If this was your loft, what would you do?

Please don’t for­get to visit Julia and add your own Freaky House Pho­tos.

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I have a con­fes­sion. I can be quite a slob.

The evi­dence: Exhibit A — My craft room, The SMOR (sewing machine oper­a­tions room), about 24 hours ago.

When we bought this house, we knew one of the rooms would be used for hob­bies. Unfor­tu­nately, we had been using the din­ing room table pre­vi­ously so we had no fur­ni­ture to set up in there. About the time we moved, I was given a very nice cut­ting table and sewing machine desk. They came from a fam­ily friend who had passed away. Sadly, she was a heavy smoker and smoked in her hobby room. The tables just ooze nicotine.

My father in law con­vinced me that I shouldn’t try to paint them, as they’re cov­ered in melamine. While I’m fairly cer­tain I would be able to repaint them, new fur­ni­ture would be eas­i­est. Of course I decided this after try­ing to clean one of the tables with bleach (Bleck!) and ruin­ing a per­fectly good skirt.

So I struck a deal with my hus­band. If I clean the craft room, could we build new fur­ni­ture for the room? He agreed, poor sap.

So this is where it stands cur­rently. Not “clean” per se, but every­thing has been gone through and sorted and I found all kinds of stuff I had for­got­ten about! Score. My M.O. was to grab what I needed, take it down stairs to craft, bag/box up what­ever was left and toss it in the SMOR when I was done. Bad bad. I had at least 15 empty boxes when I was done, and dou­ble that amount of bags to recycle

(I still need to vac­uum, obviously.)

This is the table I want we’ll be mak­ing, free plans cour­tesy of Knock Off Wood. It’ll go well with the IKEA Expe­dit book­case that’s in there currently.

I know that if I had a vehi­cle right now, me and the boys would be ter­ror­iz­ing Home Depot and Lowe’s. I’ll keep you posted on our progress. I’m super excited to make my own craft fur­ni­ture, and for so much less than Pot­tery Barn too!