My Sewing Room

Now that I've finally decided that I need to move out of this house and find a new place to work, here's a tour of my sewing room! I hope that in another year's time I will have a new, roomier space that's not part of my house.

I've lived and worked here for over 4 years now. Since moving in I have accumulated four industrial sewing machines, lots of new sewing tools, and a thrift store worth of used furniture.


Here I am pretending to sew. Thanks to Whitney from Bows and Arrows/Maker's Mart for taking some of these pictures!


This is my cutting table, plus a better view of my straight-stitch industrial machine. More info on that machine can be found here.

I have two walls full of windows in a room on the second story of a 100+ year old Victorian house. The house was built at the top of a hill and the ground is eroding on one side, so the entire back of the house (including my sewing room) is sloping downwards and slowly sinking down the hill. I love the view I have (mostly just trees in the summertime) and I love how I feel on top of the world in this room, but it would be nice to work out of a more stable place. All my furniture and machines have to be propped up on one end so that they are level.


Here is the opposite corner of the room. My computer desk, another industrial sewing machine, and lots of storage is in this corner. This room used to be a kitchen so I have built in cabinets and a little mirror. I also have a linoleum floor, which is awesome because it's difficult to clean thread scraps and faux fur fabric dust off of carpet. The wall behind my desk looks like shit because there used to be a big metal sink there. I had to tear it out of the wall when I moved in, and now I can't push my desk all the way back because there are pipes sticking out of the wall.


This is the third corner of my sewing room with my third industrial machine. (My fourth machine is over at my parents house because I don't really need it at this time.) I still have more small shelves to put on the wall above the machine. I'm pretty good at using every amount of space available in my room. When you have limited space, you can either stack shelves up to the ceiling or hang tons of things from the walls.


Fourth wall: my shipping supplies are stored above and below my air conditioner. My air conditioner can only keep the room to about 10 degrees cooler than outside, so on 105 degree summer days this place turns into a literal sweatshop. This room was added on after the house was originally built (you can see the original outside wall in this picture) and the bastards who built it didn't think insulation was necessary!


I use my bedroom to store clothing samples, fabric, and other stuff that doesn't fit in my sewing room. This clothing rod holds samples and patterns, and I have three rows of shelves above it that hold even more stuff.


I keep fabric rolls and faux fur fabric in a big metal shelf. The box on the bottom holds my roll of thick manila pattern paper.


You didn't think you'd get through this post without a cat picture, did you? This is Paco. She sleeps all day while I work. It's cute and annoying, because she makes that bed look so damn comfortable.

That's all for now! Here are more pictures from the Maker's Mart interview:






And what the hell, might as well post a picture of my house:

Sacramento Stuff #4

It's been over a month since my last blog post, oops! I'll try to do a bunch of posts this month to make up for it. I've been working myself too hard, as usual. I've been taking a Quickbooks class and finishing up the new men's hoodie pattern. After that and then sewing and shipping orders every day I haven't had time for much else.

This Sunday I will be selling handmade clothing at Maker's Mart at Bows and Arrows. It's at 19th and S Street, which happens to be only four blocks from my house. I could totally roll my clothing rack all the way there, hahaha.

I'll be selling stuff along with lots of other artists and designers. Bows and Arrows has been interviewing us and photographing our workshops for the Maker's Mart blog. You can see the Deranged Designs interview here. They also recently interviewed Amanda Caroll, an old classmate of mine from a tailoring class. It looks like there will be a good variety of handmade products for sale and I hope to see a lot of other familiar faces this Sunday!

I might be a little tired for Maker's Mart because Saturday night will be this summer's first Trash Film Orgy movie at the Crest Theatre. A lot of my friends have worked for TFO and their movies are a shitload of fun. There will be a zombie walk around downtown Sacramento and then the Army of Darkness showing will start at midnight. Fuck yeah!

  

One more thing worth mentioning this week: my friend Nick Avey recently got a new camera and updated his photography website Takeover Tokyo. I'm going to hire him for some photo shoots this fall and I can't wait to see what he can do with some Deranged Designs outfits. I'm still trying to find a picture of me in my costume at the annual Mad Max/Apocalypse party photo gallery, but since was gone for half the party I might not be in there. So much fun...

No wonder I haven't posted in over a month, this summer is going by so fast!