To my surprise, several people have asked to see my studio, so here goes.

The floor is easy-to-clean vinyl tile and the lighting is industrial shop lights.

First, the story of how I got this big space. When we planned the house, the garage had to be moved to fit everything on the lot. Once the garage was attached to the house, it didn’t cost that much more to build rooms over it. So my studio is over a double garage, making it roughly the size of the entire house in which I grew up. Times change, occasionally for the better.

Yes, that space inside the crudely drawn yellow square is my studio! And just so you know, my husband is holding a quilt out the window from the landing on the stairs for this photo 😀  The studio has windows on 3 sides, which is wonderful for the light but does lead to some issues with heating and cooling.

I have two cutting tables in the middle of the room. Sometimes both are on risers, sometimes just one. Sometimes the second table is used for other crafts.

This is the office nook where I write my blog and edit photos as well as doing other officey-things.

And this is a big storage cabinet I’ve had for many years. My husband put it together from a kit and it has served me well.

My bookcase (which I built myself in a long-ago woodworking class). When the book collection outgrows this space, some books have to go. The items on the top are from my grandparents’ pottery collection and my mother’s basket collection.

Most of my stash is stored in chests like this. I lined the drawers so the fabric doesn’t stay in contact with wood. The chests came from various second hand stores, though I did get one from a family member for 5 cents!

This is the visitor corner. There’s an extra sewing table in close proximity to one of the cutting tables so I can have a friend over to sew together. And that’s my backup sewing machine, a Bernette, that some of my visitors use so they don’t have to drag a machine up the steps.

Another view of the visitor corner showing the reading rocker for visits from my husband and my great-great grandmother’s travel trunk. There’s also a cute vintage sewing box I was recently given. It will be refinished and repaired some day soon.

The studio has multiple nooks built in to make it seem not so cavernous. They will hold built-in cabinets eventually, but the woodworker has a loooong list so for now they hold temporary storage.

And finally, here’s my main sewing area. Putting the SewEzi perpendicular to a large table makes it easier to apply binding to large quilts, among other things.

CAVEAT: The woodworker has a much larger shop in its own building behind the house. I didn’t include pictures of that because I don’t want to give the woodworker in your house any ideas!

My friend Linda over at Flourishing Palms blogged about her participation in the Dreamlines quilt-along, so I checked it out and, of course, signed up. Here are the strips made so far

And here is the link to the Dreamlines quilt-along if you’re interested. If you scroll down this landing page you’ll see where you can sign up for her newsletter and get the project each month. Even if you don’t do that, go look up “Dreamlines Brenda Gael Smith” on Pinterest to see some of her wonderful work.

Also from the internet, I somehow decided to enter the current round of PROJECT QUILTING, which you can learn about here. The challenge this week was the “54-40 or fight” block. Here’s my entry, an 18″ mini-quilt.

I’m afraid it proves that there IS such a thing as too much Kaffe! But it’s done, and it was fun, so good enough.

Finally, here are my blocks so far for the Studio Stitch Block of the Month. I’m enjoying the challenge and the variety.

What have you been up to lately?

I publish this blog on Sunday, so what’s up with a random mid-week post?

Because I made something for the current PROJECT QUILTING challenge, here.

The challenge requires making something quilty from start to finish within a week, and must be posted by Saturday, which is why this post is early. There will still be a regular post on Sunday.

This week’s prompt is “a novel”–any novel. I made this card because the occasional romance novel is my guilty pleasure (OK, one of my guilty pleasures), and it did double duty as a valentine card this week!

Process: I took something from the discard bin and applied heat-n-bond to the back. Then I cut out a heart, fused it to the front of a blank card, and zig-zagged around the edge. 

Fun and done!