studio tour: fieldguided

This week's studio tour is from the lovely Anabela of fieldguided. I simply love Anabela's blog and all her creations in her shop. Follow her on twitter too! I'm excited to have her here today sharing her studio with us. Hope you enjoy and are inspired today, friends.

I use a tiny little room in my apartment as my sewing room. It's about 6 feet by 7. It has a door that used to lead out to a balcony above the front entrance, but is now a Juliet balcony. I usually end up cutting & tracing out in the living room since space in this room is so limited. I also can’t bring my ironing board in here at all, so sometimes I move my sewing machine out too. This room gets really wonderful light because there are south-facing windows, which is my favourite thing about the space.

When I set up this room I had nearly no budget for it at all, so I’ve had to be creative with storage solutions. A lot of the things in here came from thrift stores, antiques markets, Home Depot, or Ikea.

We bought a narrow but long length of plywood at Home Depot and some legs at Ikea, and my partner Geoff built the table. I painted it a peach colour. I have large storage boxes underneath that I use to store my fabric. The boxes are numbered so that I can write down what each box contains in a notebook. My chair is a lovely yellow enameled stool that a friend of mine found in an antique shop for $10.

I love to surround myself with pretty things in this room. I often change things around. I have lots of cat things, shiny things, milk glass, and pink objects. Geoff doesn’t complain about the fact that the rest of our apartment is a bit girly but this room is definitely the most girly. Some of the things I have include an old velvet floral hat that I got from Miss Quite Contrary on Etsy , spools of sequins, found photographs from Clever Nettle, a cat mask from the dollar store, and a Diana+ Dreamer camera that still has a roll of film in it.

My sewing machine is a Husqvarna 230 Electronic that was made in Sweden in the early 1990s and that I bought second hand at a sewing machine shop. I love the 1990s colours! It’s been a great machine for me -- I have never had a problem with it, even while sewing leather. My serger is an old Singer that I bought from the sewing studio where I learned to sew. They were upgrading their machines at the time, so I got it for a good price. It’s a workhorse! I found my adjustable dress form on Cragislist. It took me months of stalking Craigslist to find one that was affordable! I think I paid about $60 for it, which is actually a huge bargain in Toronto, where things like this are quite hard to find.

I have a cork board that I have covered in little mementos that I have collected over the last few months. The Lancome ad from 1940 came from Sofia Barão’s “French corner” on Etsy, where she sells French antiques. I also tacked up some of my favourite business cards, and ones from people who are special to me. I usually have them littered all over my apartment so it was nice to put a few up (my favourite is the one for Summerland). The bits of nude lace were in a package I got from Alice of Forest Bound -- I had put the package contents away and rediscovered it recently. I love when that happens.

I like to use Japanese sewing books for making dresses. I’ve built up a small collection but I’m always on the lookout for new ones. When I took these pictures I was about to cut out some tencel to make a dress from the Daily Sewing Book.

Anyone who sews knows that you tend to accumulate a lot of notions and small tools -- I find that pegboard is invaluable for organization -- for something that is quite inexpensive, I think it looks really nice. I recently bought this simple galvanized steel storage unit at Ikea for $15 to store my overflow fabrics (including the fabrics for Summer Water). I have more boxes on this shelf! There are just so many tiny bits & pieces that are easy to lose. I keep some of our shipping supplies in the box with the business card on it.

I hung up a variation of our Mini Meow tote on the wall -- we haven’t produced this one yet so at the moment it’s just a reminder that I have to do that!

One of my favourite things in this room is the “Happy Cloud” lampshade I got from my dear friend and Summer Water partner, Caitlin Holcomb. It has a pink lightbulb in it! I rarely use overhead lighting but I couldn’t resist giving this room a pink glow. I also hung up the sign I made for our Little Winter table as a reminder of one of the best weekends I had all year.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour, and thanks for having me, Danni!

----

Now accepting studio tour submissions! If you have a studio you think would be a good fit for being featured on oh, hello friend, please email me!