Reading through this blog, you’d be forgiven for thinking we have a big, sprawling house. In fact it is pretty compact. The rooms aren’t huge by any means but we try to make good use of them. The children’s bedrooms double as their playrooms, the kitchen table doubles as their desk for homework, the dog lives in the hollow under the stairs and the living room is on it’s way to also being a library. Hearing that, it should come as no surprise to you that the guest room I did a feature on a while back is also my craft room.

Fancy a tour?

The guest room is an odd little room, long and narrow with a deep alcove at one end and a slanted ceiling. Two skylights and a small window let in a huge amount of natural light on a sunny day. Our massive walnut tree stretches our over this end of the house and shields the room from the worst of the sun’s heat in the height of summer. I’ve most left thte room white to give it an airy feel. Plus my eclectic collection of books, fabrics, paper, magazines, ribbons, buttons…I could go on… is so colourful in itself, a neutral background is best.

The desk serves as a resting place for works in progress and for source of inspiration. It gets a regular clear out so as to povide a space for guests to use as a bedside table. That’s why my above-desk racks are so handy. The black rail is the Ikea Fintorp rail from their kitchen range. I find it perfect for balancing spools of twine and storing my wire clippers, pincers and so on. The sorting box (what’s the proper name for these boxes?) is ideal for washi tape, stamps, odds and ends of string, copper wire and the like.

Above that there’s one of two Ikea picture rails for my craft books and sewing books as well as postcards and photos to cheer me up, inspire me or just make me smile. The other picture rail is on the end wall of the room and holds a similar array of reference books, craft books and pictures.

The light fitting over the desk was a chance find in our local diy shop. The were selling off the light fittings from their lighting section and I got this for a tenner, including the bulb. In the same sale I got the light for our landing.

When we moved in, I planned to have the alcove as a snug little reading area. As a mother of two under threes I don’t know when I thought I was going to have time to sit and read in peace. I put in a bench and an Ikea Arstid wall lamp and never sat there. A couple of years ago I replaced the bench with a work space and it gets plenty of use. The table legs were €2 each in our local diy shop and the desktop is actually an offcut of a kitchen worktop that was being sold off for very little. It happened to be the exact width of the alcove, which I think was serendipity.

The view from the bed is of the pink alcove wall and I think it must be a pretty nice thing to wake up to. The workspace at this end of the room is where I mostly work on paper crafts. My cutting board, guillotine, and wrapping paper all live there as well as several mugs of brushes, charcoal and pens.

Even though there are times when in haven’t the time to work on any projects in the guest room, I love that I have a space just for me. A room of one’s own, as Virgina Woolf put it. Do you have an particular space to call your own in you home?