welcome to my studio

 

we've finally made it to february! i swear, i think january was 782 days long.

something fun and new has been capturing most of my time these days - jewelry making.

now i know i've talked about this before and shown y'all pictures of some of my first earring attempts but shit's getting serious now.

chris spent both of his christmas and new year holidays moving rooms around in our house - moving boxes (pretty much all mine from my house) out of our spare room into the shed then moving j into the spare room so that he could set up my little studio space.

a jewelry making friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that to really get into making jewelry i needed a space dedicated solely to it, some place i didn't have to clean up after every session so that i could leave in the middle of a project and have it be there waiting for me.

i tried to do that on the dining room table (which we rarely use for meals) but it's also kind of a catch all space so my stuff kept getting crowded out. then i tried to set up a space in our bedroom but there just wasn't room and i never used it so chris took matters into his own hands and, voila, my studio was born.

i have been busy obtaining all the makings for jewelry and i've spent quite a bit of time in there coming up with designs and putting things together. my jewelry "company" is named skull baby boho so that's why some of my first efforts have been sugar skulls but i plan on having a lot of boho in there as well.

i've been working on getting the space as pretty as i can (even though some of j's toys haven't quite made it out of the room yet) and one of the first things i did was put up new curtains (see old curtains below)

because i want the space to feel as magical as possible and those boring beige curtains weren't working for me.

i also took back my mother's dress form (which i had given to c but she wasn't using it and had set it out in the hall) to hang some inspiration necklaces that have been made by others. of course i had to put a hat on it because i am all about hats and i think it looks cute.

i hung this sign on the door to proclaim to the world that this is my space but that's become somewhat of a problem. i started playing in my studio (and referring to it as *my* studio) during a weekend when the kids were with their mother and the more time i spent in there, the more i realized i wanted the whole space to myself even though chris had basically told c that she could use it too.

we got her a sewing machine for christmas which she has not opened or touched or shown any interest in but one night, while i was in another part of the house, chris started setting up a table for her sewing machine from an old bunk bed frame and when i walked in the room and saw my table and shelving kind of shoved aside to make room for this massive sewing table, i was feeling some kind of way about it. 

after the kids went to bed i walked in again hoping that my feelings would change but they hadn't and i got tears in my eyes because it felt like my stuff was being taken over for something for the kids even though they have large rooms of their own with plenty of room for their projects.

chris came in, all proud of himself for coming up with the design for the sewing table and asked me what i thought and i, very quietly, told him that it really bothered me to see all my stuff shoved in a corner and that i had never wanted to share the room in the first place. i had never voiced that outloud and i guess that's selfish of me but i feel like i've had to give up so much and i've done so many things for the kids and this was the first time something was being done just for me but now it wasn't. i guess i never should have put that sign up on the door and let myself think of it as mine. chris said he understood and will try to figure out how to move her sewing machine into her room. since she's shown absolutely no interest in getting the machine out of the box i guess there's no hurry and i'll just continue to work in my half of the room and ignore all the stuff that doesn't belong to me.

if it ever really does become my room, i have all sorts of plans for additional shelving and storage plus i'll need a place to store all the display items that i've been collecting to use when i start selling my jewelry at craft fairs.

but before i start selling, i'm going to have to get a lot better. sometimes my hands are so clumsy that i feel like i really suck at this even though i love it. i know there's a learning curve and i just need to keep at it. at least i'm having fun even while i suck!