top of page

A Tour of My Studio

Welcome to my studio.  My art studio is in my home and it’s split between two locations: the fiber art studio and the main studio. 

 

My fiber studio is located in the basement of our home.  Right now there is a lovely upright piano in one corner of my space, but as nobody uses it anymore – hopefully, we will be moving it out soon.   My fiber studio space consists of a desk area with my Babylock Embellisher (felting machine), a couple of bookcases, some inexpensive shelving to store all my fabrics and fibers, and a tabletop (made from an old closet door on top of two bookcases) for my Bernina Sewing Machine.  I also have my grandmother’s vintage secretary desk, which will be moved into the space the piano is using.  I will probably paint it a lovely, fun color as I love how they look when they are painted!

 

The main studio is now located in the former shop.  My very first studio area used to be in a bay of the garage, but I got seriously tired of my chair rolling downhill while I was trying to paint!  So I moved the tools out of the shop and my studio in.  My main studio is not that big, but it’s filled with furniture and art supplies that give me a great deal of pleasure! 

I use some of my grandmother’s vintage mahogany furniture in my studio which nobody wanted.  I love it, but it didn’t fit in my home’s small dining area. However, I figured out that it works well for my art space!  The dining table as my main art-making space.  I do keep it protected with plastic tablecloths and lots of newsprint drop clothes.  I also use the buffet from the dining set but I did paint it my favorite color periwinkle (and probably made my grandmother roll over in her grave when I did. Lol).  I also added some shelves for the lower middle section so I would have more storage.  The buffet is actually perfect for working while standing up plus I have an old bar stool (from in my childhood home) to sit at if I need to.    

I LOVE vintage/antique items and I love recycling/upcycling – so I have slowly filled the rest of my studio with unique pieces that are not only cool to look at, but they are super-functional as well.

For example, I have several pieces of furniture that are real vintage pieces and are kind of bucket-list items for me.  Those are the vintage (probably antique) mail sorter which I got at a flea market and was already painted a lovely purply-orchid color, and a set of vintage library card catalogs which by style, are probably from the 60’s and not the most eye-pleasing – but I painted them to match my colors and now they make me smile.  I have slowly filled the mail sorter with a variety of drawers which hold everything from office supplies, to acrylic paints, to dog treats.  The mail sorter took a bit for me to figure out how to remove the long, thin metal pins that originally held the library cards in them.  Now that they are removed, I use the drawers to hold a ton of supplies like my inexpensive acrylic paints, acrylic inks, India inks, phone and computer accessories, all sorts of things. 

I struggled for a while with how to store unfinished silk paintings and other projects that needed to lay flat.  I finally hit upon the idea of a baker’s rack – hooray another vintage piece to add to my collection. Love it, and it rolls easily so I can move it if I need to.

I needed a desk for my computer and kept an eye open for something long and narrow – but nothing really materialized until the day I was walking around Second Use Building Materials (they are similar to a Habitat For Humanity store).  I discovered they had tons of live-edge wood boards for sale.  I found one that was an undesirable end-piece with the bark still on the back side.  I loved It, so I brought it home to be my desktop.  I found two file drawers that were the right height and used those for the table bases. Perfect!  And then I found a cute little school table to place perpendicularly to the wood plank to form an L-shape desk. 

With the addition of some shelves, my studio is chocka-block full and stores almost everything I need (I will admit I still struggle to find storage space for finished/mounted paintings).  I spend the majority of my creative time in this studio.  It’s got lovely light from the windows and door, it’s full of things that make me happy, and it’s pretty quiet and private – plus with the door to the deck, I can easily go outside and work if the mood strikes me.

bottom of page