Love Your Creative Space Blog Tour with Lilo Bowman

June 26, 2020June 25, 2020332 Comments

Today I’m excited to tell you about a fabulous new book, from my friend Lilo Bowman.

Lilo Bowman

Love Your Creative Space: A Visual Guide to Creating an Inspiring & Organized Studio Without Breaking the Bank is Lilo’s new title from C&T Publishing. It’s full of ideas, solutions, and creative ways to set aside and love your personal space for making.

Love Your Creative Space book

Click here to buy Love Your Creative Space on Amazon.

So backing up a little, I first met Lilo when I was a guest on The Quilt Show with Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims. She’s used to working behind the scenes as a producer for the show but now I’m excited for her to be the star of the show with her new book and blog tour.

The Quilt Show Set

Click here to see the trailer for my Quilt Show episode.
Lilo helped keep me organized and ready to roll on filming day!

Love Your Creative Space is divided into My Stuff (we all have it!), My Space (tiny or large) and My System. It addresses the common needs of needlecrafters, but also covers many less common topics.

For example, how do you stay organized when you head out for a class or a retreat? How can or should your space be altered when life itself changes because of a move, an illness or just getting older? There are many ideas and suggestions, along with questions to help you analyze your own stuff, space and system.

I especially enjoyed the gallery of artist studios. One space has been adapted for its owner’s special needs after a stroke left her with partial paralysis. One space is especially compact. A third artist requires both dry and wet work spaces!

If you work in more than one medium, you’ll find ideas to organize, separate and combine your supplies. The book’s photography might even inspire you to try something new!

This book recognizes that budgets for creative spaces come in all sizes, and Lilo gives helpful advice for saving, economizing and reimagining or repurposing. It’s clear that she wants makers to love and enjoy their spaces regardless of the size or financial constraints. That’s a win!

It’s a Giveaway!

This week’s blog tour includes a giveaway of the ebook Love Your Creative Space: A Visual Guide to Creating an Inspiring & Organized Studio Without Breaking the Bank. For your chance to win, leave a comment here by Tuesday, June 30. Tell me what kind of space you’d like to plan, or how you’d improve your current space.

There are other great stops on the blog tour. I hope you’ll follow these folks and check out their posts for more insight into Love Your Creative Space by Lilo Bowman.

The Love Your Creative Space Blog Tour:

Friday, June 26:

Christa Watson/Blog –christaquilts.com

C&T Publishing/Blog-https://www.ctpub.com/blog/

Saturday, June 27:

Bonnie K. Hunter/Blog-quiltville.blogspot.com

Teri Lucas-terificreations.com

Sunday, June 28:

Mel Beach/Blog – https://pieceloveandhappiness.blogspot.com/

Heidi Proffetty-heidifproffetty.com/blog

Monday, June 29:

Deborah Boschert/Blog- http://deborahsjournal.blogspot.com

Karlee Porter/Blog-https://www.karleeporter.com/blog/

Tuesday, June 30:

Lilo Bowman/Blog-https://www.lilobowman.com/

Be sure to follow the entire tour for much more inspiration around creative spaces large and small!

Creative Spaces Blog Hop Week 6 – Organizing Rulers

August 19, 2018August 14, 201815 Comments

Can you believe that the Creative Spaces Blog Hop wraps up this week? (I’m posting a couple days late due to my Dot ‘n’ Dash quilt along which just stared on Friday). If you have missed any of the Creative Spaces posts, be sure to click the links of all the designers listed the end of this post, and scroll back through their feeds to catch them all.

Previous Creative Spaces Blog Posts

Here’s a link of the other 5 posts I wrote for the hop if you’d like to check them out:

How I Organize My Rulers

This week, we are chatting about organizing our rulers and tools. I’m not much of a gadget gal, but I do love me some acrylic rulers! I have a lot of them: short ones, long ones, various size squares and specialty shapes. In the past, I used to organize them with small wooden racks that had grooves cut in them like this:

Acrylic ruler holder

This worked for a time, but I found it to be a bit too clunky and it took up too much space. So recently, I’ve switched to storing the smaller rulers in a plastic drawer in my storage closet like this:

Storing small acrylic rulers in a drawer

A bin of plastic drawers works well for my small acrylic rulers.
You can see some of my Aurifil Thread spools peeking out from the other drawers.

I hang my larger rulers using small command hooks attached to the outside of my storage closets. I like the small 1/2 pound size because the silver hooks easily fit in the holes of my rulers. Each hook can hold up to 2 rulers with no problem.

command hooks for organization

Command hooks are an inexpensive and versatile storage solution.

I have two of these storage closets shown below, so it provides lots of space on the outside for my rulers. They are easy to reposition if I need to change my configuration. I also use the command hooks to store some of my show ribbons which bling up my space nicely. 🙂

Storing Acrylic Rulers

I’m in my sewing space 8-10 hours each day so I make use of every nook and cranny for storage!

I routinely purge my rulers and other tools if I find I haven’t used them in awhile. A general rule for decluttering I try to employ is this: if you aren’t sure you want to get rid of something, put it in a box in a closet for 6 months. If you haven’t touched it in that time, you probably never will, so get rid of it!

Be sure to check out the other blog hoppers for tips and tricks on how they store their rulers and other tools. And leave me a comment below letting me know how you control the clutter in your sewing room.

Creative Spaces Blog Hop Participants

Mondays

Tuesdays

Wednesdays

Thursdays

Fridays

Saturdays

Sundays

Creative Spaces Blog Hop

Creative Spaces Blog Hop Week 3 – Organization!

July 28, 2018July 28, 201817 Comments

This week on the Creative Spaces blog hop, we are discussing organization. This is one of those topics where I realize that sometimes my perfection stands in the way of me being as organized as I should. I can be an all-or-nothing type person: if I can’t organize every last bit, I’ll let everything fall into disarray, LOL!! You can see that here in my “before” pic about my sewing room cleanup!

Creative Spaces Blog Hop Week 3

For my stop this week, I thought it would be fun to share my wish list for the things I want to get to help me be more organized in my sewing room. The last time I did a major renovation of my creative space was back in 2013 and it’s high-time for another one!

They recently built an Ikea here in Las Vegas and the sad thing is I haven’t been yet. In fact I’ve NEVER even stepped foot in one, but I’m planning and scheming and making a shopping list of things I want to get to make my sewing room a little more organized.

Drawer Unit

First up is this set of drawers. I think it will fit nicely in the space underneath my sewing table.
In the older picture below (which was before I got my new fancy sewing machine), there’s a spot under the table to my left where I think these drawers would fit perfectly.

When I first got my sewing desk way back in 1999 or 2000 it came with an option to add a set of drawers there. The biggest regret I have is not making that purchase back then. I don’t even remember the brand of table it is and sadly, the shop I bought it from is long gone.

Sewing Table

This older image was from before my first sewing room redo in 2013.

Next up, I’ve been checking out Pinterest and Google for ideas on making a customized cutting table. The basic idea is to get 2-3 shelving units with wheels and put them together, then add a piece of wood on top. I need it to be mobile because it would go in the center of my space and I’d need to move it out of the way when we do photography.

ikea shelving unit

Here’s one possible shelving unit above that would work. This will definitely take more time and research, but just like any large project, that’s part of the fun, right?

Finally, the biggest purchase I’ll need to make is some larger shelving units that can fit end to end along one wall of my room. I’ve been getting recommendations that lots of folks really like the Billy Bookcases from Ikea, and this image from their site has piqued my interest:

Billy Bookcases from Ikea

Image from Ikea

So those are the 3 major things I want to purchase for my sewing room to make it more organized and usable. I’m in the very early stages of planning and I know it will take time and money to make this happen, but I’ll be sure to keep you posted on how it’s going!

Be sure to check out all of the other stops on the hop for additional ideas on how you can organize your own creative space!