Studio Makeover
Happy Friday! Here’s a few photos to show you how it’s going on my studio makeover, which I alluded to in the past couple issues of Friday Faves.
I decided to reopen my studio - which is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, next to the campus of the University of Michigan - last year as the pandemic began to wane, but I’ve had it for almost ten years and it needed a serious refresh. The walls were scuffed and never been repainted, and the old grey wall to wall carpet in all three rooms was pretty terrible. I started by asking my landlord to remove the carpet and add solid floor in the main room. I knew I wanted to redo the layout a bit, and give it a new coat of paint.
The space consists of three rooms: the smallest room is my office/storage, a second slightly larger room has windows and is where I take a lot of my photos, and the main (big) room is where I have tables set up for sewing and cutting.
My focus for this project was the main room and the window room. Here’s what those two rooms looked like before I started:
When I first got the space, I had big dreams for it being a co-working space - soon after, I hired Tashina, my first studio assistant, and Karen began working at the studio a couple days a week. We had a couple of workshops, I hosted open sewing nights, and taught private lessons. But it’s been a few years since I had anyone else working with me at my studio due to the combination of having three kids, Karen moving away, and then during the first year of the pandemic, I stopped going in altogether. Meetups and private lessons were out of the question at that point, and since my landlord raised my rent after the pandemic, I’ve been evaluating whether to get rid of the space or not. It functions as my personal sewing and fabric storage space (which is worth something, but not much), but is it worth having it if no one else is here?
The answer for me is to reopen it rather than get rid of it, at least for another year. So I’ve been thinking about ways to utilize this space better, starting with restarting my open studio nights, and I plan to offer private lessons and offer workshops again. Anyway, big ideas!
I started by thinking about colors and furniture to turn the window room into more of a comfortable sitting room. I wanted a sitting space where I could work more comfortably with a cup of tea and hand stitch, unpick a seam, or just write out my to-do list, but also where folks could sit and chat during my open sewing nights if they brought hand work or knitting along rather than their machine. A vision, if you will.
Then I put together a mood board from photos on Pinterest for how I wanted the space to feel. I wanted cheerful candy colors, something inspired by spring, like pink, bright yellow, and aqua, to make the space feel happy and warm. I noticed that many of the fabrics I’d been sewing with lately and yarns I’d been choosing lately were also falling into this palette. Case in point:
Clementine helped me get started with the painting. I changed my mind at a few points (like toning down that bright yellow to a pale yellow), but you can see the broad strokes here in these in-progress shots. The two paints I bought for the project were the pink (Rosé Season by Clare) and the off-white (Spun Cotton by Behr). For the other colors (green, yellow, blue), I used leftover cans of paint from previous home projects, in some cases mixing them together to get the hue I wanted.
There was a bit of a detour a couple weeks ago when I lost my way creatively, so to speak, and I ended up with this cloud and sun situation. As soon as it was finished I realized it looked much too childish for my taste, and it took a couple more days to fix it. I think this is a liability of using these pastel colors - I had to figure out a way to keep it fun but a bit more grownup, so I transformed the clouds into arches:
And the result was much better in my opinion. After hanging curtains and some of my little Geranium dresses back up on the walls, it’s currently looking very nice, if I do say so myself!
Here is the window aka sitting room:
And here is the main (big) room:
It feels really satisfying to finally have it finished. Looking back on my original inspiration images, I’m not sure it’s exactly what I envisioned when I started? But I’m happy that I did manage to transform the space into something cosy, happy, and fun, which is exactly what I wanted to do.
I’m excited to start hosting sewing meetups (though it’s probably more accurate to call them “stitch socials” as folks usually brought crochet, knitting, and other hand work projects to work on in addition to sewing projects, before the pandemic) and offer private lessons again.
If you’re local and would like to receive my local meetup invites, you can add your name to the email list on the form at the bottom of my workshop page. You can also check that page for classes and workshops and a link once I get private lessons up and running again as well.
Finally, I just want to say that I realize how incredibly lucky I am to be able to even have a studio space like this; I really lucked out when I found the space ten years ago, and it feels like a minor miracle that I’ve been able to manage to hold onto it for so long, through the birth of a baby, and despite cutting back significantly on how much I use it since I got it.
I feel like this year is a test for me: if I can’t figure out a way to utilize the space to build community and support my business, I am going to let it go. So…wish me luck this spring as I reopen it. I’m going to do my best to give it the energy it deserves!