A New Crafting Space and More

For the last six years, I’ve been using the dining room as a makeshift crafting room, sitting at the big table to paint and sew. Well, the other day Rob and I started talking about how I needed better spot to work in, and we decided to turn half of the Little House, the small outbuilding that serves as our home office, into a cheery crafting space. Heck, while we were at it, we said, we’d redecorate the whole place. (The Little House is not at all pretty, and its furnishings have sustained a lot of cat damage over the years.)

I was full of ideas on the subject: “Let’s paint the Little House so it’s not so drab,” I said. “Let’s paint it a pretty pastel green or maybe a light salmon pink. And let’s get a big closet-like cabinet to store all my crafting supplies, and let’s trade our big, heavy desks for enamel-top tables. Oh, and I could get an old card catalog to hold all my little jars of beads and sequins.”

While I couldn’t convince Rob to start painting right away, he did agree to go furniture shopping on Saturday. We spent six hours driving from store to store in Tallahassee, coming up empty at every place. I was in low spirits when I got back home, but after a while I rallied. I decided to shift gears and work on another project Rob and I have been discussing—removing the Vine House, our once-cute-but-now-rotting little shelter by the driveway.

I started prepping the Vine House for demolition by stripping it of its decorations, moving my collection of Christine Sibley wall sculptures to the breezeway. Up on a step-ladder, I spent hours festooning the breezeway with Sibley creatures, including mermaids, a giant butterfly, and a leaf-man. Every time I went out to fetch another Sibley from the Vine House, June, our smart little tuxedo cat, would run outside too. She wanted to frolic, eat grass, and roll on the sun-warmed driveway. I’d jog along behind her as she romped, and pet her as she rolled and squawked and made a big fuss on the driveway (she was so excited!). Then I’d bring her back inside, where she’d await her next opportunity to escape. As she waited, she kept herself busy by climbing to the top of my step-ladder, batting my screws around, and burrowing into the cordless drill’s carrying case.

“June,” I said, “you’re being so cute I can hardly stand it!”

When I got all the Sibleys hung, the breezeway looked lush and fancy, I thought. The Vine House, on the other hand, looked forlorn and empty, so I dreamed about the plants I would replace it with—native wax myrtles that would soon be full of berries and birds and maybe even a bird nest!

It was just about dark when I switched gears again and went back to the Little House project. Rob had been cleaning the Little House, and we decided to go ahead and move some of the weird old furniture out even though we had no new furniture to replace it. We carried an old bookshelf to the garage and planned how we’d try to sell it on Facebook Marketplace. Then I spied a little folding table in a corner behind the lawnmower and decided to set it up in the Little House as a temporary crafting table. The folding table gave me a place to put my easel and my Sta-Wet Palette. Then I had another flash of inspiration: I realized I could use the cedar chest in the Little House to temporarily store the rest of my painting supplies until I could find the big cabinet I was envisioning.

I spent the rest of the night and pretty much all the next day happily emptying out the closet in the dining room and organizing my canvases, paintbrushes, paints, rags, and other supplies in the Little House. The dining room looks awesome without my crafting mess. Now maybe we can start actually dining in it again!

As a side note, here are a couple of examples of the kinds of crafts I like to make. These are my two latest acrylic paintings: