How to Turn a Bedroom Into a Craft Room

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Take back your dining room for dining. It's time to spread your wings in your own craft room!
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Doctors need their offices and architects need their studios. Retailers need their stores and sales people need their cubicles. So, why shouldn't crafters have a place of their own to work? If every nook and cranny in your home is filled with various stages of craft projects, it may be time to turn your spare bedroom into a craft room.

Craft rooms not only offer a dedicated place to work -- a glorious place where you don't have to clean up a project every time you step away -- but they also offer a single place to store and organize all of your tools of the trade. No more grabbing scissors from the kitchen, paper from the office and glue from the basement so that by the time you sit down at the dining room table, inspiration has gone right out the window.

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If you're a multi-faceted crafter and you have some space to work with, you can even set up different stations for different work. Seriously, who wants your scrap book paper to get stuck to your felt roving, or your fabric to get covered in glitter?

 

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Craft Room Furniture

desk system
A desk, tall shelves and cubbies give an organized crafter room to work.
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As with any workspace, having the right furniture makes all the difference in getting work done. The needs of a craft room are pretty simple: Crafters need a place to work and a place to store their stuff. The worktable is perhaps the single most important piece of furniture. You'll want something with an ample table surface and a height that keeps you comfortable during long stretches of gluing and stitching. A drafting table that can rotate and angle is a good choice.

A good chair is also a sound investment. Drafting chairs, which look like the giraffe version of a regular office chair, are good choices because they offer the comfort and wheels of a cushioned office chair with the height of a stool.

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You'll need good lighting -- a combination of an ambient overhead light along with task lights at each station. And of course, ample shelving is a must. Modular cubbies along with a combination of wall shelves and freestanding shelving units should offer enough options to find a place for just about everything.

If you have a business aspect to your crafting, you may want to have some sort of desk in your craft room as well. But you definitely want this space to be separate from your worktable. Piles of receipts and a long to-do list aren't really very inspiring.

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Craft Room Organization

fabric on shelves
Now, that's some organized fabric.
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The key to regular crafting is to have everything ready to go when inspiration strikes. Organization only actually works if you make it a habit to put things back after you're done using them. Creating a dedicated place for everything is helpful for getting into this habit.

Come up with an organizational system that makes sense to you. You can organize by item, by alphabet or by color -- whatever gets your creative juices flowing and makes things easy to find. See through storage is perfect for this. Clear plastic boxes that fit on shelves are great for storing larger items like spools of yarn and sheets of felt, and smaller glass jars are ideal for stashing notions, like buttons and needles. Not only will this make them easy to locate, but the wide range of colors will also add a decorative element.

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A pegboard hung on the wall is perfect for hanging tools in plain sight that you use regularly, like your scissors and glue gun. You can even outline them to remind yourself what goes on that hook. A large bulletin board is a must as an inspiration board to hang magazine pages or fabric swatches for visions of future projects.

Lots More Information

Related Articles

  • Booy, Karen. "Organizing Your Craft Room." Getcreativeshow.com, 2010. http://www.getcreativeshow.com/Craft_Sew_Business/Business_Seminars/craftroom.htm
  • "Jetmax U-Shaped Craft Room." Michaels.com, 2010. http://www.michaels.com/Jetmax-U-Shaped-Craft-Room/ae0663,default,pg.html?fdid=ideas-2010-october
  • "Make a Craft Room." Countryliving.com, 2010. http://www.countryliving.com/crafts/projects/make-craft-room-0306
  • "Organized Craft Room Ideas." Hgtv.com, 2010. http://www.hgtv.com/organizing/organized-craft-room-ideas/index.html

 

 

 

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