Needles on the Move

I was hoping to review a new book today for you, but RM didn’t deliver on time I’m afraid, so it’ll be next week’s post. Instead, I thought I’d share my workspace at home.

I snapped this picture a week or so ago after a particularly messy day, the kind of day where you rush from one thing to the next, digging through boxes and dragging out stuff you forgot you had to spin a couple of yards. I can hear you giggling - but yes, I do tidy up each night before Neil gets home.

The window is the focus of the room, it faces southish and there’s loads of light. The stool behind the spinning wheel is where I do almost all of my photos, and you can just see the sheets of white card standing there that I use to reflect the light back for a shot. In the corner behind my spinning chair is a standard lamp for the evenings - not as good as natural light, but still adequate. If I’m knitting, I’ll sit at the window end of the sofa to make the most of the light as well.

It doesn’t make for the tidiest room, but I really like everything to be where I can get at it. The bookshelf behind my spinning chair holds equipment: lazy kate, charkha, spare bobbins, maintenance tools, prep tools etc. There’s boxes of buttons and sewing kits and knitting needles. On top of the bookcase are baskets with ‘current’ (ish) spindle projects in them. The bookcase used to also hold all my craft books, but it was overflowing and they were very hard to get to, so I have a new bookcase now which you can’t see, it holds all the books and baskets full of handpainted fibre. On top of the bookcase are neatly stacked 10 11litre plastic boxes full of yarn, and jars full of spindles stand next to the books.

The black suitcase under my desk holds the undyed fibres, bulk lots of BFL, alpaca fleeces from the farm, other class supplies. It’s amazing what you can squash into a huge suitcase! Also under the desk are a couple of project bags with wips in them. The little boxes on either side of the TV hold the overflow, one’s full of cotton, one has dyed mohair, another has silk supplies for the luxury fibres class. Spin-Off magazines live on the shelves under the TV, also easily accessible and they like to lie flat.

The latest addition to the room is the basket by my wheel. I bought it at a country fair last year and I absolutely love it! It’s the dumping ground for anything in the categories ‘working on at the moment’ or ‘hoping to get to this very soon’. At the moment (I cleaned it out a bit) it holds the yarn and pattern for the current Sock(topus) Club socks; a couple of balls of handspun which I am thinking of knitting something with, but probably should put away; the second half of the gold silk that I’m spinning for the next Spin! series - it’s been languishing there for ages while I get distracted by other stuff; the next fibre for the SoFA fibre club, and also, an odd sock and its yarn - never going to be finished I’m fairly sure!

Last but not least, my loom lives under the coffee table. You can’t really see it, but it’s behind the box, which stores all the bits and pieces that I need for weaving. I’m standing at Neil’s desk to take this photo - it’s his only corner of the room, poor guy. But he doesn’t really seem to mind. Luckily, we have a separate eat-in kitchen (not common in a 1 bed flat) because there’s really not much more to the living space than you can see here!

So what’s your space like? Do you take over everything like me? Or pack yourself neatly into a little corner :-D I’m pretty sure Neil secretly longs for the days when I had a whole other room upstairs away from him…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under A Writer's Life, Spin-In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.