Sunday, January 16, 2011

Opening Doors...

The picture above is a pretty special (albeit fuzzy) door. It's the front door to the house that Paul and I just bought! I'm so excited to move in and make this place our own. One of the things that's great about this place is that there is a specified yarn studio!  I set up a yarn studio in my apartment this summer, and I want to share some photos from the first studio. Many of the same elements will be present in the new place.



I have a penchant for hand-winding yarn, which can mean many skeins stay in their original form until I'm about to use them. Miss Effie gave me some accordian-style hat racks on one visit to her farm and they became the perfect way to add color, and warmth, to the white walls of my 1915 apartment.

 
The turquoise cabinet was one of the first pieces of furniture that I bought when I moved to Davenport and started my first real job. It is from a store in LeClaire called Artswork. They have a cool mix of furniture, jewelry and art and a lot of it is fair-trade! The wash basin was purchased at my favorite antique shop, Antiques on Brady, just north of Vandeveer Park. It's a small shop, but very, very cool. There are awesome buttons, lots of extremely clean kitchen items (including my favorite blue Ball canning jars), and some really neat furniture. I also got this awesome wooden ironing board there, for practically nothing.






The glass cabinet definitely was not enough to contain my yarn stash, so I needed some more storage. I accomplished this by stealing an organization idea from Susan B. Anderson, one of my favorite knit bloggers and a wonderful designer. I'm especially charmed by her toy designs. On one of her posts she mentioned some chicken coop style shelving she purchased from Sundance. I just couldn't resist!





I still needed a way to store/display all the small leftover balls of yarn from former projects. I can't throw yarn away, especially any of the natural fiber variety. This dilemma was solved by a few hanging produce baskets. Thanks, Mom, for remembering I mentioned this and finding them for me!!





The studio wouldn't be complete without knitting books and patterns. I acquired a bookshelf from my parents house that my dad built when I was a little girl. It fits perfectly under a window, and looks pretty great with the red office organizers that I bought on clearance this summer.





In the center of the room was a dining room table with a tablecloth I got from Anthropologie. If I had endless funds, I'd furnish my whole house with housewares from them.




Oh! The reason it's a dining room table and not a work table is because the yarn studio also happened to be the dining room. As you can see, I didn't host too many dinner parties :)