Sewing Room Organization: How to Organize a Sewing Area Affordably and Easily

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How to organize a sewing room easily and affordably. I upcycled old containers for storage and purchased a few other cheap items to help make things look nicer. A clean sewing room is absolutely necessary if you want to have a safe and effective work area. It doesn’t have to be an expensive or impossible endeavor. 

I have a corner of our basement set aside for my sewing area. Our deep freezer and keg are in there too, as this is our sectioned off “kid free” area and it has a partition to keep the kids out. I expanded the area when we moved things around in the basement and I finally got it all cleaned up.

I really had let things go. When I was in a smaller area, I just didn’t have the space to put everything. And I always am bringing home more fabric or supplies or patterns. I needed a place for everything. I find sewing very therapeutic normally, but sewing in chaos was… chaos…. just chaos. There’s nothing therapeutic about not being able to find what you want, not being able to move, and not feeling safe. Because really… where did the pins go…

Just to give you an idea of the chaos, this is the sewing area before I expanded and cleaned up:

LOL! Bad, huh?

I finally got it together and got everything organized. It’s such a relief and now I can happily sew again. I think it’s hard to work in chaos, particularly because it’s difficult to find the items that you need.

Here are some tips:

• The Dollar Store containers hold items like zippers, elastic, and thread.
• I used (Amazon affiliate link) Chalkboard Labels to label everything.
• I upcycled glass jars to use for storage for small items like beads, snaps, and pins. This upcycled palm leaf basket works great too.
• For organizing fabric, I used (Amazon affilate link) Ultra Pro Comic Series Silver Age Size Boards 7 x 10 1/2 Pack of 100 to wrap the fabric neatly and store on the bookshelves. You just wrap the fabric around the board… it’s just a piece of white cardboard so I imagine you could use other materials, but this was cheap and easier than cutting up my own.
• For smaller cuts of fabric, as well as a bin for my unfinished projects, I used a couple of Antonius storage systems from Ikea. I have a wood board on top of them that I used with a (Amazon affiliate link) cutting mat to cut fabric.

I don’t have a good picture of my sewing desk, but it has a couple of drawers and a separate small filing cabinet. I put my patterns folded up inside folders in the filing cabinet. It’s a nice way to keep them organized and from getting ripped. The smaller drawers have baby proofing on them and that is where I store my pins and some of my scissors. I also have an area high up on wall with my rotary cutters and other scissors hung up. That’s just painted pegboard.

I think I spent under $40 to fix everything up- most of the work is just taking the time, although I had a lot of items like old bookshelves and such already in my sewing area. They just needed to be cleaned up. I’ve seen some beautiful sewing areas on Pinterest and mine will never compete with those- I don’t want to spend the kind of money or time to make my area immaculate. But I want it to be easy to find things and to keep track of what I need to order more of. Now I can do that. And I’m definitely running low on elastic (gasp!).

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