As I watched a webinar last night from Andrew Mellen’s De-Stress your Mess 5-DAY Challenge, I kept thinking how I might adapt his ideas to my sewing room.
The topic was Organizing Your Kitchen. Andrew swears by this organizational triangle:
- One Home for Everything
- Like With Like
- Something in, Something out
He explained that professional kitchens are organized in the following area:
- Prep
- Cooking and Baking
- Food Storage and Pantry
- Beverage
- Tableware and serving
- Cleanup
Diving your kitchen into thinking about these functions and applying the three rules from the Organizational Triangle, you can organize your sewing room/area in the same way!
This is how I divided my sewing room into different organizational areas:
- Sewing/Serging
- Pressing
- Current Project Storage
- Tool Storage
- Notion Storage
- Pattern and Book Storage
- Fabric Storage
With these areas in mind, I next took an inventory of the physical spaces that I have in my sewing area and attempted to assign them to a particular purpose.
| Area | Space | Contents/Function |
| Sewing/Serging | Sewing Table Serging Table |
Sewing/Serging/Pinning/Assembly |
| Pressing | Ironing Board Table |
Pressing before, during, and after construction |
| Current Project Storage | Basket on Sewing/Serging Table | Contain all project materials |
| Tool Storage | Sewing/Serging Tables for daily use items, drawer by Serger for other items | Scissors Pins and Clips |
| Notion Storage | Thread Zippers Buttons and closures Embroidery Thread Elastic Zippers Binding and Cording Interfacing and Batting |
|
| Pattern and Book Storage | Filecabinet | |
| Fabric Storage | Totes | Each tote is organized by fabric type: cotton, knits, “fancy fabric,” polar fleece and outerwear, etc. |
Doing this step helped me to see where I am struggling with the organization of my sewing room. My biggest areas of struggle occur in the storage areas for patterns, books, and fabric. I simply have too many to fit my container. The answer is not to get a bigger container because the room will not hold a bigger container. The solution is to simplify and purge — a difficult task for me!
I plan to come back to each area as I organize them to show you my finshed progress!