My Hubby Cleaned My Sewing Room

This morning my Beloved Spouse cleaned out my sewing room.  If you've never seen my sewing room, you have no idea what a powerful act of love and housework this was.

First, a bit of background.  My sewing room is our spare bedroom.  It holds my sewing machine, which sits on a cool old desk that used to be my dad's.  It holds my BelSpouse's former drafting table, repurposed as a cutting table.  It holds my formidable stash of fabric and patterns - in plastic tubs, on shelves, rolled up on bolts in the corners.  It also houses our two cats' litter box.  One of the cats (the antisocial one) lives in the closet.  There's no carpet, thanks to the hot water tank that exploded a couple of years ago.  There are no curtains on the window, and the walls are the same hideous shade of almond beige they were on the day we bought the house.  Sounds like Eden, doesn't it?

The upshot is, I love to sew.  But I don't do it nearly as much or as often as I'd like because my sewing room is chronically messy, cramped, disorganized, and redolent of kitty litter.  Recently I hit upon what I considered the only solution to this problem:  A top-to-bottom complete makeover of the room.  New paint, new floors, new window treatments, new furniture, an array of built-in storage cabinets, a custom sewing table.  Then - and only then - and not until then - would I be able to take on any more sewing projects.

Room makeovers don't come cheap, of course.  So I devised a corollary solution:  To finance the sewing room project, I would sell my large, fabulous collection of vintage clothing on eBay.  For those of you with keen powers of deduction, yes, I like clothes.  And I adore vintage fashions.  My collection spans the 1940s through the 1980s, and I don't just like to own them; there was a time when I wore them as part of my everyday wardrobe.  Those were fabulous days.  They were also much thinner days, which is part of what made them fabulous.  Nowadays, my hourglass figure runs closer to half-a-day, and my awesome vintage collection unfortunately competes for space with clothes I can actually pull over my hips. 

Those clothes deserve a good home, and I deserve an amazing sewing room.  So for the last couple of months I've been selling them off, piece by piece.  I've done OK - so far, the Post Office has lost two dresses, and one deadbeat bidder failed to pay for her purchase, but other than that, I've been having fun and sold some really cool items to some really nice people.  The money is coming in; not too much and not too fast, but it's coming in.  Conceivably I could eventually sell everything off and make enough money to pay for the makeover.  And then I could start sewing again.

Meanwhile, my BelSpouse isn't much for grandiose plans.  When he called me in to my sewing room this morning, I was expecting one of his periodic "When are you going to do something about this room?" lectures.  Instead he showed me a miracle.  All of my fabric tubs were neatly stacked against the wall.  The various unfinished projects were cleared off the cutting table and placed on shelves.  There was not a speck of stray kitty litter on the floor.  The closet doors actually closed. 

The walls are still almond beige, and there's still plenty of clutter if you look close enough.  But I can walk across the room.  I can lay out a pattern.  I can sit down and sew - right now, today.  All thanks to my wonderful, unimaginative husband and his lack of design vision.  I don't really get how his mind works.  But I guess he gets mine.