SYNTRYZ Stitches

Chairs, cutting table and sewing table. Lamp, fireplace chair with wool blanket. Just to sum up a few of our other features. We collected a lot of our items from friends, for instance my black sewing table was an Ikea model my neighbor was getting rid of. Although it was past it's prime for a dining room table, who cares if a cutting and sewing table has a few marks, I put my cutting mat on it to hide some small slits it had on it's top and also to protect it, we also added large casters to the legs so I can easily move it around and if I have friends over to sew we can put the extensions in to make it longer.     Another friend gave me an actual cutting table that folds up, it needs some new casters which I have yet to purchase but I can also pull it out and set it up if I get some major cutting projects going on.     I was kinda hoping for new office chairs and had my eye on some at Ikea but even the basic ones get pricey when you want more then...

Dad re-faced the cabinet with new doors and my Ikea button rug is on display. This cabinet was already in our sewing room and when we were making our plans I didn't really like how it looked but because of the size and use-fullness, we didn't really want to get rid of it so I just left it as a question mark on our plans as we started.  One of my favorite things to do when we are remodeling any room is to keep a check on our local Habitat for Humanity, we have one less then a couple miles from our house, not everything is a great deal but it's those one-time-only finds that keep me coming. So I can't remember what I went to look for but they had pallets of cabinet doors marked down to $1 each. We took a guess as to which size doors to get but they ended up fitting just right. Dad made a frame around the cabinet which before was just open shelving, and now I can hide all my stuff I store which included my shipping supplies, and my organized pattern collections. I...

  Another great time saver has been my new snip/trash cans. After we got everything together and I started sewing in my new room - I wondered where to put my trash cans that I put my thread snips and other small trash in. Now in my old room I had many small pails on the floor by my feet and I was always dumping them over when I went to step on my pedal. Since Dad had been collecting the free magnetic strips from Harbor Freight it gave me an idea: Why don't we attach the magnet to the trash can so I can hang them and also be able to remove them for dumping. Dad added 2 belt buckle blanks that we had in our stash to 2 Dollar store buckets and my problem was solved. We attached one to my cabinet and one to my table and I'm tempted to add another.

Pretty girls like to sew   On the other side of my room from my smaller sewing machines, I'm leaving my 2 larger ones out on their new counter. We got the 2 cabinets from the IKEA clearance sections, all put together with premium door fronts and hardware, I paid $75 for one and $55 for the other, plus the counter top is leftover from our kitchen redo, originally got that on clearance for $50. We had these in storage for over a year before we started to redo the sewing room and they ended up fitting great. Plus I found my 'Pretty girls like to sew' print that my niece had sent me several years ago, I had been saving it for the sewing room so now it's nicely displayed.

When we were planning to do our sewing room makeover I thought it would be great to have all our sewing machines in one spot. Between Mom's and my collection we have a few and before they were either spread out on tables robbing us of precious work space or stuck under the ironing board or other tables keeping our feet from safely treading. I was hopeful that they would all fit in an IKEA Expedit bookcase and even though I tried to measure I wouldn't know for sure till it was time to load it up. Well all of my sergers fit, [If you wonder why I have so many, they are left over from a commercial account that I use to sew a lot for, some I've worn out but I can still get a few more stitches out of them so I'll keep using them till the end] and I have a few of my larger machines on the table on the other side of the room. What I love about this is that they are all in one place and when I'm done with the one or two I'm using I can put them up and have my table fre...

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting pics of our completed sewing room. We all love how it turned out and it's already gotten a lot of use with a very busy past couple of months. But first I wanted to tell you about my lighting. One of the key upgrades we needed for the sewing room was really good lighting so we could work when it was dark or winter outside. Before we would go out wanting to get a full day of sewing in on a day we were stuck inside but get so depressed in a matter of minutes we'd come back in. A couple years previous Dad had put a new window in and that helped but still needed more. We ended up installing 4 Led 4 ft lights on the ceiling, I believe they show up on a previous post, but I had also been saving some Joann's gift cards that my friends had given me for a lasting purpose, so I decided I would also buy some spot lights with them so I could light up my work or my photography corner even more if need be. I waited till the OttLite brand went...

We love how our ceiling came out for the sewing room. It was actually an idea we had seen on Pinterest. I had already picked out the 'white-wood' paneling but I wasn't sure how it would look on the ceiling. Then I found a pin from someone else who had used it in their basement and had them cut in half and then rotated them which kinda gives it a basket-weave design. (Perfect for a sewing/craft room.) Plus our room is 12 feet by 16 feet so they fit perfect and I  think it makes the room feel larger. Lowe's will cut them for you before you leave the store so it also made it easier to bring them home and to install them.