Where Bloggers Create Link Party Post

Karen of My Desert Cottage has been running a blogging party where creative bloggers are invited to create a photo post featuring their own creative space, big or small.  I'm late joining in this event as I only found out about it yesterday and couldn't put together a post (my second today - wow!) until this evening.  However, you can see all the lovely links and Karen's own studio post here.

There are some amazing work spaces featured, including large rooms holding a stunning amount of stash with many non-working surfaces displaying a huge collection of decorative knick-knacks and curios.  Some of these studios are works of art in themselves!  Having said that, I'm grateful that I don't have the dusting of some of them and I wouldn't like to have to pack the contents of them for a house move!!!=)  LOL!

Anyway, even though long time readers have seen my room and desk space before, there are always new readers who may be curious.  Also, one of my reasons for joining in this is to show that, whilst big and beautiful rooms are a joy to work in and to have a good look at, they aren't strictly necessary for creating works of art.=)

We live in a medium sized flat (apartment), which is the biggest we've ever had, but still nowhere near big enough for me to have a double-bedroom sized room for myself.  Sir has one, but I'm still in the queue for a good sized area, where I can even leave the sewing machine out etc etc.  Much of my stitching actually takes place in our living room, in this corner of the sofa.  The white scatter cushion actually on the seat is there to even up the height and stop me getting sciatica, as, like pretty much all our furniture, the sofa is worn out and needs replacing!!  This workbox lives in a discreet corner just inside the dining room end of our main room.  I keep my main collection of plain/solid colours in this, such as stranded cottons, coton à broder, perle cotton etc.

Moving on to my own tiny room now.  The room is 1.9m x 2.1m, which is around 6 feet, so it really is small.  This is the view from the entrance.  I can't say 'the view from the door' as we had to take the door off as it was inward opening and you could barely turn around in there!  So, we replaced it with an old curtain from our previous home.  It gives a little privacy and helps keep the heat in when I have the fan heater on during winter days.

Virtually every space is taken up, so I wouldn't have room for any more souvenirs than the postcards and bookmarks you can see decorating the back wall.  Sorry, it isn't very tidy at the mo!!

This is a closer view of the shelf area:

And here's a shot of the plastic drawer towers, which are, of course, one small set on top of one large.  To the left of the larger drawers is a basket bag full of hoops, plastic snap frames (Q-snaps and R&R Frames) and things like that.

Anyone interested in seeing the contents of these drawers may like to visit this old room reorganization post where I give a bit of a tour of things like that.  They haven't changed a great deal.

The last shot is the lower part of my main bookshelves where I keep all my stitching books and magazines as well as some art pads and books and so on.

The 'Butterflies' books on the left hand side of the floor is to go back to the library this week and the 'Little Flowers' one is my latest acquisition when I won Mary Corbet's giveaway (I'm still stunned about that one!!)  It's on the floor as yet as I don't actually have any shelf space for it just now.  In her 'And the winner is post', Mary mentioned that I wasn't one to arbitrarily add new titles to my embroidery book collection, well this is one of the three reasons why.  (The others are lack of funds (almost all my recent buys have come mostly from cashing in Nectar points on e-bay!) and a decision only to buy what I think there's a real chance I'll use!!!)  My last buy (Jane Nicholas' 'Stumpwork Butterflies and Moths') is sitting, out of view in this shot, above the Chinese dictionaries you can see top left as I haven't room for that either!!  I need a bit of a clear out....

So, those are my creative spaces.  One is just a corner of the living room and the other, the tiny box room that most people probably just cram their junk into.  Hope it's been of interest and maybe even inspiration to some.=)

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014