My new pad

Does anyone else have this exasperating problem? That when you manually highlight the whole post, just to make a copy in case the publishing goes mad and deletes/connection times out etc, it just deletes the whole thing anway? I just watched that happen and, as I was taking it in and thinking, 'Quick! Take advantage of the 'draft save' facility, the dratted thing kicked in all over again and saved the now blank screen. Talk about raging!

Anyway.... This may well be shorter than the original was!! Click on the photos for clearer views if you want them.

Here we are all settled into our new home, which is somewhat bigger than our last and has given me my own study/studio AT LAST! As many bloggers seem to be reporting on their creative spaces right now, I thought this was a good time to get back to my long neglected blog. It's a very small room, as you're about to see, so you may have to breathe in...

This is my desk area. Thankfully, I have a big desk that can fit lots on it and still give plenty of room to work.=) On the front wall are things like favourite bookmarks and some souvenirs from our travels. I like the Korean dress (hanbok) best and plan on finding out a good deal more about things Korean in the future.

On the windowledge I have pots of pastel pencils (and brushes) and tubes of paint and the yellow container there is mostly flashcards for language learning - many of which are crammed with vocab I encountered on my recent course in Taiwan. On the right hand wall you can see scissors and tape measures for ease of access and there's my laptop open at my Google and Blogger homepages.=)

On the desk are the materials and initial design things for me next project. Not that I've touched the current two WIPs lately, but....

To the left of my desk I keep these three silver grey stacker boxes. The bottom one contains mostly regular fabrics, (although there are some nice cotton oriental rolls in there and some lurex seriously fancy things that I got direct from the mill that produced them as a child. My dad had his workshop just above the mill and rented from them. They gave me offcuts sometimes and odds and ends on reels of lurex!). The middle one holds mostly embroidery kits along with a bag of felt pieces and a folder of odds and ends of patterns - old iron-ons, for instance. In the top are counted thread fabrics, black, white and cream surface work fabrics and 'helpers' such as Vilene, Bondaweb and so on. There are also zips, trimmings and a few other things in there too.

Next to that we have a basketweave bag of hoops and frames and then my 'outdoors' bags, such as my handbag etc.

Onto the bookshelf space:

It wasn't possible to get a full length view of the shelves as the room is just too small and I was sitting well back on the desk in order to even get these! So, this is the top half. On the very top of the right hand one there are two baskets, one with my lovely oriental fabrics and the other containing my silk, satin and sheer fabrics - all carefully stored in clear plastic bags. The cat litter tray on the other side holds the audio components of some of the many language courses I own - cassettes and CDs aplenty.

The sun bleached out Japanese - Thai on my upper language shelf, (languages are stored alphabetically, but Chinese is kept mostly elsewhere) and the linguistics end of the lower shelf, so that's what you can't see well here. Science is at the top and in the box on the lower left shelf are my silk and fabric paints.

At the bottom here we have mostly needlework and art stuff. Lots of magazines as you can see and also many pads of multi-coloured art papers and tins of pencils. In the little 2-drawer arrangements are my pan watercolours (as opposed to tubes) and top quality pastels as well as a number of things like stumpwork wire and so on.

I'm hoping to get some shelves above where the stacker cartons are to get the boxes of greetings card blanks, papercraft materials, general stationery, pens and pencils off the floor under my desk!!

So, hope you're enjoyed this brief visit. I'll be doing my art, craft and design work in here, (as well as plenty of language study and some science stuff), but stitching will be on the comfy sofa in the living room as ever.=) Hope to be sharing the fruits of my labours in here via my various blogs over the months and years to come. Today I hope to get on with the finalising of the design here on my desk and get that into commission and will post more about that soon.