Shared bedroom sewing space tour

We've been living in Bogota for 13 months now, which means we've passed the halfway mark of our time in Colombia. So it's probably time that I get this shared bedroom sewing space tour published, don't you think?


Our apartment here is enormous. The master suite (including bathroom and walk-in closet) is large enough that you could fit three reasonably-sized bedrooms into it.  One side of it backs onto a sliding glass door that exits onto a terrace overlooking the city. We never use the sliding glass door because there is another door to the terrace from a common space.  So we decided that this was where my sewing space would go.

We don't usually ship much of our own furniture to our overseas assignments, but I did ship my sewing table and am glad I did. The drawer unit holding up the right side of the table holds PDF patterns in envelopes, pattern weight, tools and extra feet for my machines, bias tape makers, etc. Pieces of my WIP usually live in the second drawer from the top.

Here's what the entire shared sewing room looks like.

As you can see, I didn't clean up before taking this photo.

We don't need the dressers for our clothes (see aforementioned walk-in closet), so they are stuffed with fabric. The short dresser holds wovens and the tall dresser holds knits. The wooden trunk next to the short dresser is only about half-full and holds my yarn and knitting equipment. The plastic tub on top of the trunk holds larger fabric scraps.

The shared sewing area has this great built in, which at one point was organized.

The cabinets below hold small tubs like the one with the green lid, which hold elastics, ribbons, snaps and other sewing notions. My serger thread and buttons are in the small drawers. The large bin on top holds my patterns. The plastic bag has patterns that I bought in the U.S. and haven't put away yet. The rolls in the back are my large-format PDFs.  On the shelf above are sewing things that I don't use much here: binders of PDF patterns that I haven't referenced in awhile and could probably get rid of, the box of fluff that I have been carting around since 2010 and my serger cone holders, which I decided not to put up here since I had the drawers.

The iron security bars over the sliding glass door are perfect for shared sewing space organization. I use them to hang my thread spool orgagnizers, my measuring tapes, an embroidery project and my collection of zippers (which are secured to a wire hanger with sewing clips). The metal pencil organizer holds tweezers, scissors, a knitting needles for turning and usually scraps of bias binding that I use to stabilize shoulders. The striped fabric bin holds pin cushions and sewing needles.

I love this shared sewing space.  It's bright and airy and I have room for everything I need.  I don't believe I will ever have a space as nice as this one.  The one downside of it is that I can't sew into the night when my husband is sleeping, but I haven't really wanted to do that very often since we moved here.  I don't know whether it's the altitude (8600 feet) or the fact that the sun never sets after 6:30 p.m., but it's a rare night that I'm up past 10 p.m.

I hope you've enjoyed this tour around my shared sewing room! If you liked this post, take a look at some of my previous sewing rooms:

The mobile sewing room

Step into my cave

As always, thanks for reading and see you next time!