Craft Room

April, already?  Busy doesn't even come close to describing my schedule lately.  To be honest, things have been absolutely insane.  I have a few moments to spare right this minute so I thought it would be a great time to update the ol' blog.

One of the biggest changes that I have made lately was moving my craft room.  Previously, I was in a small section of my basement.  My basement is a "multi-purpose room" that was housing my craft room, is a movie/living room and also acts as a part-time spare bedroom.  A few years ago, my sons decided that they wanted to be bunked together in the same room and our 3rd bedroom was then transformed into their playroom.  We decided that the areas might be better used if we moved the boys playroom downstairs, along with all of the gaming systems!, and then move my craft room up into the 3rd bedroom.  So we did it.  I painted the bedroom exactly how I wanted it, including the trim and I love love love it!  I did lose some space in the move, but I gained a small closet, a bigger window and the loss of space is helping me consolidate and purge.

I am almost finished putting the final touches on my new room to show you but in the meantime, I will show you the pictures of what my room looked like before.  The walls are a butter yellow color, to go with the "theater theme" in the rest of the basement.  My craft room was an afterthought when it came to picking the colors of the basement, so I had to just live with the yellow.  It worked ok. (the actual color of the basement is much prettier than the pictures show.  It really is a butter color and not so much a sunny yellow)

Lets start with this corner.  As you can see, I got stuck with the Christmas tree.  I couldn't "sell" my husband on the ambiance that it would add to the other side of the basement and how awesome the "outdoorsy" feel would be when he invites his friends over to watch the UFC fights.  He wasn't buying into it AT ALL!  So we had to make room for it in my craft room because, well, we have nowhere else to put it.  Literally, we have outgrown our house tenfold, but that is for a different blog post.  I also have "stations" in my craft room like my drafting table (from college) that I use to draw, paint, do paper crafting and alike.  The built-in basement shelf also came in really handy with holding knickknacks.....

and my growing button collection:

Please notice that although I got stuck with the Christmas tree, I did insist on getting the only window in the basement.  As we rotate clockwise, you will now see my sewing table.  The sewing table is actually my desk from high school and college.  It was probably made in the 70s and we bought at an estate sale when I was in middle school.  It was that fake painted-to-look-like-a-better-quality-wood. After we moved into this house, I sanded it and painted it a super glossy white and traded out the 70s brass hardware for a brushed nickel.  This desk works very well as a sewing table and the chair is actually a spare to our dining set.

More of the knickknacks that I don't need and don't know what else to do with, under which houses my spare sets of knitting needles in a "caddy" that I made with scrap pieces of fabric.  That purple thing in the corner, wearing clothes, is my duct tape dress form.

Just pass the under-the-stairs-storage-access is one of my favorite furniture pieces.... the lockers!!!!  There is a small strip mall just around the corner from my house and right after we moved in, there was a hardware store in the strip mall selling sets of lockers like this for $50!!!  SOLD!  We picked out the coolest set.  You can't see it, but on the back corner it looks like it was dropped, which is probably why it didn't make it to the school it was intended for.  It's cool, we could probably hammer it out but no need, it's still functional.  The locks on the lockers are the collection that the hubs and I have made over middle school, high school and college.  On the top are craft books and my old sketch books.  Scrapbooking paper-y stuff is next to the lockers.  Did I mention that the lockers hold a bunch of stuff???  You should have seen the piles of pictures and books that I had to take out of there to move them.  WOW.  And they are heavy!!!

In this picture, you can see the curtain divider that I made to separate my craft room from the other side of the basement.  We made the "curtain rod" out of conduit piping and I found the decorator weight fabric for the curtain panels on a huge sale that just happened to be a few shades darker than the wall color. For a curtain divider that spans about 13.5', floor to ceiling, I think we maybe made the whole thing for under $50.   In front of the curtain is one of my childhood furniture pieces housing my fabric.

And next to the fabric hutch is my industrial shelving.  I think I paid $70 or so for these shelves at a big hardware store.

As you can see, the overall theme to my craft room is mismatched, hand-me-down furniture that I LOVE!!!!  The total space here was about 8.5' x 13.5'.  I lost about 20 square feet in the move and the room that I am in now is more of a square shape instead of such a long rectangular shape.  I have a few more things to do with it and I will be posting the pics soon.  Until then, happy crafting!