SYNTRYZ Stitches

  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...

Juki HZL-29Z Sewing Machine sews in reverse  What to do when... You have scheduled your day so you can fulfill your many sewing orders but for some odd reason a pin pops from behind your feed-dog (I did not run over a pin!) falls down into your machine and now your sewing machine only sews in reverse.  Do you ... A. Get behind your machine and sew backwards. B. Take all the screws out of the machine and try to take it apart. C. Shake it like mad and hope the pin falls out. Last Friday this was the predicament I was in. I would have probably been a lot more mad if I hadn't been so tired. I worked more than 2 hours trying to fix my machine. Don't get me wrong, I love my little Juki machine and even though it's just a basic machine, with the few special stitches it has, I can get a lot done with it instead of having to use multiple machines, for instance it has overcasting which I use when I make my tiny dog sweaters since they are too small to go on the serger...