Your Sewing Space

Guest speaker, at the January meeting of the Cabot Quilt Guild, used the book, Creating Your Perfect Quilting Space by Lois L. Hallock, as the basis for her talk. As an Occupational Therapist, she was quite willing to give us some valuable pointers on making our sewing rooms work for us. Through interaction with the audience she found out the type of activities quilters perform and the type of pains and injuries that occur. Sitting, standing, sewing, cutting, and ironing were some of the activities mentioned. Many members confessed to suffering from back, neck, shoulder, wrist, hand and finger pain. Proper lighting was also an important consideration.

Here are some common sense points she made:

1. Have a good chair that fits you - she gave some pointers for sitting / working properly
2. Get up and stretch at least every 20 minutes
3. Your arms should be at elbow height when in use
4. Have your work area set up to avoid a lot of reaching and stretching
5. Cutting tables and ironing boards need to be at the right height - blocks can be purchased to raise tables.

I realize that you are going to say that all this is common sense - it is! BUT how many of you may need to rethink at least one thing in your work space? When I got home that evening, I had a look around my room. I was satisfied with the room except that it isn't near big enough. However, the brain must have been working overtime while I slept that night. The next day I moved one of my machines further to the left of the table to give me more space to the right as I am right handed. Again, why didn't I think of that before now! I also purchased a steno chair with variable height. The one I have doesn't go low enough to use comfortably with one of my machines. It's great for working at the work table.

Check these out:
Sewing Room Organization, more here
Organization and Tools for a sewing room
Organizing Tips for a small sewing room - check out the related articles and videos

Things Organized Neatly!

Getting organized! I have learned not to change the location of 'stuff' that I use a lot. Whenever I've done that, I kept looking in the original place, forgetting its new location. Check out a previous post for organizing your sewing room.

However, this post isn't about you organizing anything. I discovered this neat site called Things Organized Neatly. Some of the things that have been organized are actually works of art. To see each month of posts, click on Archive. Also do a Google search of 'things organized', and click on the images. Lots of stuff to see.

Sometimes you need to go outside the box and look at different things. This often helps to get the creative juices flowing again.

Check out these:
Pika Land - about art and illustration
Walking Paper
Trendland
Automatism Blog
Design Inspiration
Swiss Miss

Have fun!

Getting Organized

This posting is for my quilt buddy, Anne! Last evening at Eastern Edge Quilt Guild meeting, Anne was one of the program participants who showed us her lovely Christmas present of marvelous fabrics. However, getting a new stash of stuff meant getting organized all over again. Anne's presentation of how this was happening at her house, was very entertaining. Anyway, Anne, here's a site called Today's Creative Blog to help give you more ideas. The Domestic Diva shows a way to organize fabric too and there are a bunch of links for organizing your sewing room and craft supplies at Tipnut.
Happy Organizing!!