Embroidery Treasures

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Click the video player to view the tour of my sewing room. It may take a few minutes to load. For those of you with a dial-up connection, you can "view" the tour by reading my description below.
This is a series on sewing room organization and storage, complete with videos! Over the next few weeks, I'll share ideas for fabric stash organizing, thread storage and cataloging embroidery designs. Be sure to visit my blog every week or sign up for my newsletter for the lastest issue!
I'd love to hear the many ways you organize and store things in your sewing room, so leave a comment with your favorite sewing room ideas!
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One thing that helps me a lot is to take lots of notes, write to-do lists and plan out my day for what I am doing. I have day planner which almost live by. I make notes of what I need to do today and days and weeks in the future. If you are working on projects that have deadlines, it is a good idea to plan a month or two ahead of time what you need to do each week to get that project done by the deadline.

Also, if you write down and make a list of your unfinished projects and then schedule in those project over several weeks and months, you'll be much more likely to get those projects done if you're continually reminded of them on your calendar.

For the quilt classes that I am teaching, I keep all the information I need in notebooks with sheet protectors. All of my written handouts are inside, plus template for pieces of the quilt and some fabric samples inside reminding me how to cut out pieces or finish certain techniques. As an example, for the MarJen for Error class I am currently teaching, I have all my written handouts, plastic template pieces, notes for fabric yardages and thread colors, some fussy cut fan fabric pieces for the dresden plate and decorative stitch samples.

You can do the same with classes you are taking or projects with multiple parts and pieces. Keep your directions and templates all together in a notebook or folder. If you are taking it to class every week or month, it's easier to tote back and forth and keeps all your instructions together. Plus if you decide to do this project again, you'll have everything together.

I keep clipboards with college ruled notebook paper everywhere. This bookcase is their permanent home, but they usually end up anywhere in my sewing room. They are great to carry from my machine to my computer to my cutting table, writing notes on something I'm creating.

Many times these clipboards will be filled up with notes and references for the last couple months of projects I have stitched. Every couple of months I will sort through the papers, deciding which ones are trash and which ones I want to keep for something in the future.
I keep notebooks for journaling. I always carry a notebook with me when I'm traveling to classes or our local quilt quild. I always can jot down notes with ideas whether it's from the teacher who's speaking, show and tell or other ladies in the same class. There's always something I need to write that I will want to refer back to in the future.

This is especially helpful when you travel and visit quilt shows. Usually you are so overwhelmed with so much information that it is impossible to remember everything you hear or see. Keep a notebook and pen with you and you can always make notes wherever you are. Also, be sure to carry your camera to take pictures. Some quilt shows will not allow photography, so you may not always be able to use it. But your camera is a wonderful way to remind you of ideas that are of interest to you.

I use an inexpensive, college ruled, spiral bound notebook for notekeeping, for journaling my finished projects and for storing ideas for future projects. You could purchase more eleborate notebooks or journals to store all this information, but I have found that school notebooks work very well.

One notebook holds websites and blogs that I want to look at. Many times I will run across various quilt companies, websites or blogs as I'm frequently on the Internet, but don't have time at the moment to investigate them further. So I will jot down the web address and keep it for when I have time to look at it more in detail. I also jot down notes of blog topics, my weekly newsletters and Monday giveaways on my blog.

I have one little themed folder that has doll clothes in it that I stitched and sold when I first started sewing. I took photos of all the clothes, pasted them on pages in sheet protectors and wrote descriptions. There's about 8-10 pages in this folder of only doll clothes.

Another notebook holds past projects I have made. There are photos of a vacuum sweeper cover I made in November 2004. I have the Simplicity pattern I used along with the fabrics such as denim for the dress and a Christmas print for the apron.

My camp quilt I made in the summer of 2005 is listed in here. I have some notes listed such as I made three quilts in one month (I don't have the note written down that I won't EVER do that again, but I won't do that again - 3 heavily embroidered quilts in one month is just too much!). I have listed some of the fabrics and supplies I used in the quilts, how many hours it took to complete the quilt and some of the embroidery designs and packs I used in the blocks.

There are photos of hooping some of the blocks, embroidering them on the machine, laying out the quilt and then the finished quilt. I also took one of these quilts to the local county fair, state fair and a local museum for display. There are photos of the quilt in each of those places as well.

Take photos of your finished projects and keep them for reference in the future!! It's so neat to look back several years and see how your sewing has improved. It's also fun to see what you made, when you made it and who you made it for. It doesn't have to be anything elaborate - post a photo, jot down a few notes like the date, who it was for and a few details and you're finished!

I don't do as much journaling with photo prints as I used to, mainly because all of my photos are now digital. I can always print those photos off or send them online for prints to be made, but most of the time I store my photos and notes that correspond with them on my computer.

For example: I have some details photos of my camp quilt and I have all of them grouped together in one folder. Then I also have a text file with notes about the quilt and photos in the same folder. I use Notepad for my text file, but you could use any word processing program such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Then be sure you have all that data backed up, so if something would happen to your computer, you still have all that info!

It's great to photograph and journal your finished projects, but it can take a lot of time. With doing electronic journaling, I can usually get my past projects photos grouped together and notes written faster than putting everything in a notebook. But a hard copy is fun to have and flip through as well. Whatever you do, go ahead an journal your projects, but don't spend so much time doing it that you're taking away time from your sewing!

Then I have an idea notebook with photos and notes of projects I have seen and like and want to do in the future. For example: While in Chicago for a Bernina training in 2005, I saw a tote bag with some neat decorative stitches that I wanted to try stitching. So I have a photo with a note saying, "I love the decorative stitches and the ruffle at the top."

Remember that a picture is worth a thousand words and that really is true. If you have a photograph, you'll usually remember that project more than if you just have some written details. Take pictures, date your entries and write what you like about that idea and keep it for using in the future.

I have another idea notebook that I keep my ideas and sketches in. So often I run across ideas or someone will give me an idea that I want to remember, so I jot it down. I keep class notes and ideas in here as well. I will probably have many more notebooks full of ideas than I will ever be able to stitch, but they are there if I ever need them!

That's where I keep all my journals and ideas and how I store them in notebooks. I really encourage you to keep a journal of your sewing and quilting projects. You'll feel so encouraged several years from now when you look back and see how much you've improved in your ability. Plus it's also a great way to keep ideas for future projects.

This bookcase also stores my books and magazines which I receive every month, which is way too many! But they always have great ideas inside and I frequently refer back to previous issues. I sort them by the type of magazine - Sew News, Creative Machine Embroidery, Designs in Machine Embroidery, Fons & Porter Quilting, Creative Expressions and various others.

The next shelf holds my quilt and machine embroidery books - some by Alex Anderson, some by Jenny Haskins and many others. I also keep my machine and embroidery software instruction books here. I often use post-it tabs to mark pages in my instruction books that I frequently refer back to. I also have a couple of pattern books and embroidery design catalogs.

My collection is not as big as others. I do a lot of my research on the Internet and that is where I get a lot of my information. I have lots of information stored on my computer such as text documents and ebooks that I download from the Internet instead of being in printed book form.