Honeybee*Hill

When my husband and I bought the house we live in, we were just two crazy single kids in love. We had been living in an apartment downtown over the city’s Republican headquarters (we weren’t spying, I swear!) and were shopping for a house because it was in the middle of that housing market thing where everyone and their dog was getting mortgages. We saw this house and thought it was just perfect for the two of us — two bedrooms, just enough space to be cozy but not cramped, tiny backyard we could put a garden in, monthly payments lower than our rent.

I remember the day we went to sign the papers. I had a gig that night at a local bar (in my past life I was a singer/songwriter with the guitar) and I dedicated my performance to Aaron because he “bought me a house” (I remember saying that in the mic to the bar and being really proud of him). After we got home though I didn’t feel so hot and got this weird sinking feeling. We stopped off at CVS and I picked up a pregnancy test. Surprise!!

Anyway, we’ve lived here for three years and we’ve made TONS of progress on the house, but it’s really tiny for our soon-to-be family of four. I find that I spend almost 90% of my home-time in one of two places and I thought I’d write a little about them both: my creative space/sewing area and my garden.

I share a sewing studio with my husband who uses the room as an office and all of this actually happens in our dining room. We’re in the process of finishing the attic for a studio but I honestly don’t know if it’ll happen. In the meanwhile, I make do with one bookshelf and have to keep most of my fabric and all of my bolts up in closets and wrapped up in storage.

I got my sewing desk at a thrift shop for $2, changed the hardware and painted it blue. It’s *just* big enough to fit my sewing machine and serger, but nothing else. Next to it, I have a shelf where I keep fabrics larger than half a yard that have been pre-washed.

The bookshelf opposite holds my inkpads, tape, the wraps that I use when I package orders, buttons and notions for yoyos. The second shelf is fat quarters and scraps and the third shelf has unwashed yardage and embroidery notions. In my dream world, this shelf is replaced by an Expedit shelf from Ikea (maybe this weekend cause they’re going to be on sale). The unfortunate thing about the dining room is that there isn’t a lot of wall space to put shelves.I’d love to have some place I can keep all my fabric and notions readily available, but that will not be my dining room for sure! One of the nice features of my dining room though is that our table has two extra leafs that pull out and it makes a nice cutting table (I just have to keep the rotary cutter off the tabletop).

My second sanctuary in this house is the garden, which I’ve blogged about before. In the last few weeks we’ve gotten a lot of progress done in the garden. We’ve installed rain barrels to collect the run-off water from our roof and that’s been AWESOME for watering our plots. Here’s our garden as of today:

We do square foot gardening and I’ve got three boxes. Two are veggies and one is just a wild herb bed. We also have a pepper patch, a strawberry patch, rhubarb (you can’t have strawberries without rhubarb!), some random eggplants and cabbage planted throughout our yard, and a big plot for garlic. This week we’re going to dig three trenches to try trench gardening some zucchini, squash and melons.

I think our garlic plot is my favorite so far this year because we did all the hard work for it last fall and it’s grown as if by magic (I’ve totally forgotten all the work we put in to it). I also like it because it’s along the side of our house next to the alley and I wonder what people think of it when they walk by! The elephant garlic plants are near the end and they are HUGE already! They probably stand nearly three feet tall at this point. We need to mulch it down again before it gets too hot, but I’m pretty stoked about all the garlic that is going to come up from this.

I probably spend as much time outside gardening this time of year as I do sewing. It helps that Sullivan is totally happy to be outside as much as possible (me sewing doesn’t seem to entertain him as much). It seems that we’re going to be living here for the next several years anyway and we’re both of the opinion that we need to make the most of it.

What is your creative space like? Do you have a sanctuary in your home? Blog about it and let me know the link!