Hey guys. I’m writing tonight’s post from a friend’s computer. It’s a long complicated story but the short version is that the old computer I’m using at home won’t let me on here. Facebook’s fine but this blog and other much-visited sites are a no-go. Weird, right? Anyway, here I am and hope to get back into writing often even if that means visits to the library until my computer starts behaving itself.

My studio’s done! Woo! Wanna see? I know you do. If you’ve been following my posts on Facebook the past few days you’ve seen some of this. Still, it’s pretty awesome. In this, part one of two, I’ll be showing you what’s in and on my wall of shelves.

Ooooh look at that fabric storage! I fold each large piece around a board, pin it closed, remove the board and stack ’em in the shelves. It looks like a mini quilt shop and stays organized even if a cat comes in and dumps a shelf’s worth on the floor. They stay pinned in this shape and I can put them right back up. Don’t worry, I wash everything after it’s made and put it in a no-cats zone. Bought items are allergy-free.

My fabric’s organized by type and color. This is a new system for me and I’m loving it so far. The fullest shelves have tone-on-tones, batiks, hand-dyes, and solids in rainbow order. There’s also holiday fabrics, florals and novelty fabrics including foods and animals. Scraps are sorted in a similar way into bins. Each color gets its own except for black, grey, and white which share one. There’s also a bin for novelty fabrics and a large container for all of the solid scraps.
There’s a library next to my desk. It holds some of my favorite books including Sam Hunter’s Quilt Talk, Tula Pink’s City Blocks, and Megan Dougherty’s Quilting Isn’t Funny. The library also holds some fun things from friends like the bomb pillow from Trish and chicken pincushion from Eddie.
More bins are stored on top of the shelves. I keep things I don’t get into as often up there to avoid being chopped by the ceiling fan every time I access them. I can’t seem to remember to turn it off before I’m on the step-stool! Anyway, there are keeper quilts, non-cotton fabrics and more up there. The batting was up there too but will probably be moved to a lower shelf because I keep hopping up to get it. Aunt Laurie advised me to bring only the things into my new studio that are good quality, beautiful and useful. So I purged a lot of supplies, including most of my thread and much of the fabric. Why hold on to three shelves worth of florals I don’t like when they could bless someone else? Now I can pick out any piece of fabric knowing it’s something I love. And the thread? Ooooh it’s all so nice.

If you want more information be sure to hop on over to QUILTArtbyMegan on Facebook. I used picmonkey to make the photo collages for this post but you can see the full versions on that page. I’ll show you the rest of my studio next time! Maybe I’ll even have my design wall up!