studio - before the makeover

Have been uninspired and stagnating for the last few weeks - not sure why. Anyway I decided that if I could lose a large white cat in my studio it must need sorting and signed up for Myrna Giesbrecht's Quilt University class, Studio Makeover.

The first thing we've been asked to do is send in photos of studio before sorting it out. Oh the shame of it! My studio was possibly the worst it's ever been. Partly because of the large white cat hunt which involved pulling out stuff everywhere. (BTW Bixy is now pretty well back to normal but has to have more blood tests on Friday to make sure there's no pancreatitis lurking - luckily the previous blood tests showed no sign of liver or other problems. My only worry is that he might be eating too much of his diet food, though he's much livelier and lighter than when he started the diet. The scales at the vet's will tell all on Friday). Anyway, this is what it looked like after the Bixy hunt:

Bixy himself was holed up under the bottom shelves. My sewing table was just as bad, though, and I can't blame Bixy for that:

Seeing this I can understand why I haven't been doing much sewing lately - no space left!

Had decided to cheat and tidy up before sending photographs, but by the end it looked so suspiciously tidy (for me) that I sent in both lots. Now the sewing table looks positively inviting:

And the storage area looks distinctly improved (though I'm not sure I know what's where, having simply stuffed it all in boxes - one of the things I do need to do is to work out a more user-friendly system:

I have found a home for films, Angelina fibres and so on - at least for the time being until I improve on this:

The remainder of the room is the narrow portion of an L and houses more storage plus cat-beds:

There's a cutting/design table (you can see the paint and dye) plus a stand that holds fabrics for dyeing:

The pile of white fabric in the corner is a bolt-end of fabric I bought from a Lancashire cotton-mill for a price too good to miss: trouble if it has to be taken off the roll and stuffed into a black plastic bag to fit in the coach home, there's at least a hundred metres (the person who sold it me thought it had got in the wrong bin by mistake and must have been a full bolt but let me have it for £5 anyway - no-one in my quilting-group coule believe I got it for that and just thought I'd been really spendthrift). Since getting it home I've never been able to find the beginning or end of it and have just kept chopping lengths out of the middle, though it doesn't seem to have gone down much at all. I keep promising myself I'll at least cut it into 10-metre lengths one day.

Target areas now are sorting the stash and weeding out what I'm never going to use: there are people in my quilting group who might want it, and there's some suitable for children's quilts for Project Linus, making quilts for children in hospital, hospices, refuges and so on which is a project we're involved in as a group. A friend has already offered to take my Laura Ashleys off my hands (though I feel a bit guilty about this as her house is even more cluttered than mine! - sorry Elaine but you know it's true). I also want to display my stash most of which is left over from when I had my fabric-dyeing business, and have some inspirational stuff like photographs around as well as finding space to shelve the books (I have to sort through those too).

I expect great things from Myrna's class and judging by the others of hers I've taken I don't think I'll be disappointed. Watch this space!