Being a Mum of almost 3 small children under the age of 4 and all of my extended family living in the UK means I don’t work outside the home. Instead I choose to work from home. As you know I write and sew for BurdaStyle which is my main source of work, I run MixTape Zine with my partner in craft Justine of 62Cherry and I’m working towards selling my handmade creations this year.
Working from home has its pros and cons and these are different for everyone that works from home depending on their lifestyle, family commitments and work. For me the pros are that I get to be with my family and I can work at my own leisure. I can choose to roll out of bed and start work in my pajamas (which I do a LOT!) and I can work my timetable around family commitments. Before children I was a Patisserie Chef working long hours, sometimes 12 or more hours a day in stressful restaurant kitchens, there is no way I could do that sort of work now, I much prefer the laid back lifestyle I live now. I’m lucky enough to have my own sewing room from where I do all of my work which is most often messy like you can see in the photo above. My projects do tend to move around to other parts of my home too though, like my bedside table or the sofa. And of course I couldn’t live without the internet, my laptop and my digital camera!
Then there are the cons. I can’t get away from my kids, they like to ‘help’ so more often than not I’m stepping over them while I work and they’re sitting on my sewing room floor making things with the scraps of fabric, glue and paper. I’ve learned to live with it since getting stressed and trying to keep them out of the room is a huge waste of time. I can end up spending the whole morning in my pajamas which is ok sometimes but some days I just need to make that little bit of effort and get dressed otherwise I may never leave the house! And that creates another con, sometimes I don’t leave the house because I just don’t need to and that can get a little boring.
I live by lists! They keep me semi organized and I always have a notepad with me to scribble down my ‘To-Do’s’ and ideas. The last thing I do at night is write a list of things I need to and want to do the next day, of course they don’t always get done but if I don’t write the list I can lay awake at night thinking of all the things I need to remember for the next day.
I’m a messy person and my sewing room is small so it inevitably becomes untidy after a day of working in there and 2 small children bringing in various toys and craft supplies. I try to have a quick clean up every day or two and once a week I give the room a good sort out and vacuum to keep on top of it. Of course if I didn’t have so many things on the go at once it may not get so untidy but I just can’t have one project at once, I get so much inspiration from everywhere that my mind is buzzing with so many ideas but there’s just not enough time in which to bring them to fruition! I could do with some good storage solutions for my room, in particular for my BurdaStyle sewing patterns. At the moment they are clipped together with bulldog clips and hang from nails on my shelving unit. This worked for a while but as I sew more and more garments I’m collecting more and more patterns that just don’t fit on there anymore and prevent me from seeing my fabric stash behind, any ideas to solve this? Another storage solution I could do with is something I could hang all my bits and pieces from such as scissors, rulers, threads, etc to get them off my work table and create more space. I’m thinking a pegboard storage wall and a BurdaStyle Tory organiser will come in very handy.
Do you work from home? Leave me a comment and tell me all about the pros and cons you face, how you organize your time and your work space and anything else relating to this topic.
