Maura's quilting studio (in her own words)

I had researched for months what a quilt studio needed to work efficiently. Using the limited wall space I knew I had to squeeze as much storage in as I could. It’s about 15 feet by 15 feet, but one whole wall is windows.

Moving into our new house, every thing is mass-produced and bland. I began with bare walls. This was completely different from my studio in Snoqualmie where we had local and organic lumber from our own property and we worked with local subcontracters to create exactly the space I needed. The studio there was designed and built by Jonathan Seaton, a master carpenter experienced in design and building of custom woodworking projects. You can see a gallery of photos at Seaton's Fine Woodworking website. 
Jonathan also designed and built the rustic stairs in the Snoqualmie house from trees blown over or felled for safety. You can see a gallery of photos at Seaton's Fine Woodworking website.

I started to configure the studio first by using the rudimentary architectural measurements on the house plans. Trying to use the crude scale they provided was challenging. It was difficult to get exact numbers, which I needed to the inch, in order to figure out what IKEA shelves and cabinets were going to fit. I drew it out on good old-fashioned graph paper so I could erase and correct as I went, but didn’t have the real measurements until the flooring was in. Once I measured the walls, I was drew the plan out.

The sit/stand desk is absolutely the best improvement over my other studio. I can move the sewing machine and do larger fabric cutting, raise the table and not have to bend over. I also can raise or lower for better sewing positions. It’s awesome!

There was enough room for a storage bench and I ended up adding another smaller IKEA unit next to that. There are lots of Ikea shelves.  Hauling and moving all of those heavy IKEA boxes wasn’t much fun, but assembling them was. It took some days to get all those bookcases and cabinets up, then David attached them all to the walls, and they were ready to be filled up!

The furniture arrived from the moving company the day after Memorial Day. We spent a week getting all of the large stuff sorted out. The next week I met three guys from the moving company at our two storage units to then bring all of the bins of fabric and boxes of books home. I had set up the six-foot table in the studio to assist in sorting, but it was hard to access with all the clutter. Riain brought little T over two days later, took one look at the room and said the only sensible way to deal with all of the fabric was to just get it all out of the containers. It was controlled chaos, as the photos show!

It took me awhile to sort colors and fold it all. But it was lovely to see everything out in the open for the first time up. My previous studio consisted mostly of huge drawers and sliding cabinet shelves. I didn’t really know how much fabric there was until it was all up on the shelves. The only stuff I put in the closet (I thought I was going to have to put a lot more in there) was the batting and interfacing bolts. Bonus was fitting my old filing cabinet in there as well.

One of the few adjustments I’ve had to make is accommodating for the sunlight streaking into the room from various directions. Direct sunlight will bleach out the fabric at the folded ends. I thought curtains would take care of that problem, but the sun also comes in the porch-side windows, which wasn’t really an issue until the winter’s southern angle showed me that it was. I just recently had David install some blinds on each of those windows and that has remedied the problem. I’ll get more when the sun starts heading back north and invades the eastern windows.

Soon I was at work piecing together blocks and I previewed the quilt on my design wall

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