Marja Lindstrom´s creative spaces past and present

At the beginning of this week I promised you´d be able to take a sneek peak into Marja´s creative space.

I already knew that Marja had dabbled into many crafts and yet there was still more to discover about her!

Read on!

1) When did you start dreaming about having your own creative space? Did you have one as a child?

Though I've had my own craft rooms in the past, at the moment I'm back to dreaming about having a dedicated craft room again one day in the future. In past flats, we always had a spare bedroom so one room was my creative space. Then we bought a house and at first we had two spare bedrooms. I decided to take

the smaller of the two spares as my craft room. I painted it a bright pink on two walls using a paint color called Summer Pudding and the other two walls were a beige color called Tiramisu. Definitely yummy color names and with the oak wood flooring it was perfect for me. I enjoyed it for around two years at which point my second child arrived. We already had our daughter in the larger spare bedroom and I didn't want them to have to share a room so I cleared out my room and turned it into a nursery for our little boy. Ever since then I've gone back and forth wondering if it's too late for them to share a bedroom after all! He's now five years old and loves his bedroom so I guess that chance has passed.

Growing up I was an only child, living in a large apartment in Japan with 2 spare bedrooms. I didn't have a craft room though. In fact I don't even remember having a playroom. My Mom and I did loads of crafts though as my love of crafts definitely came from her. We usually used the kitchen table to do all sorts of things from origami to Japanese calligraphy painting (Sumi e) and of course other things like cross stitch, colouring books and whatever else we thought would be fun to try. Living in Japan I got to try out all sorts of creative pursuits. I did tea ceremony, Japanese Classical Dance (Nihon Buyo) and even played the Japanese Drums (Taiko) on top of the pagodas on New Years Eve at our local shrine. All of these required me to go to dedicated studios or peoples homes to participate.

Marja playing Japanese Drums (Taiko)

 

The tea ceremony

2) The day you stepped into your space for the first time, did you already know how you wanted your studio to look like or did the design evolve from the actual space?

When I get a creative space of my own again, I think I'd opt for a very minimalist look. In the past it's always been super cluttered with so much stash from my various current hobbies of knitting, crochet, scrapbooking and dollshouse miniatures. While I don't want to cut back on my interests, I've got to learn that I don't need to own everything in order to enjoy something. I dream of having my knitting yarn fit into one small storage box so that I can order stuff as and when I am ready to start a new project. Same with scrapbooking stash. I remember reading an article several years ago about how something like 10" of cardstock equaled something like 1000 sheets of paper... and I had something like 30" of it at the time. Or how I collected little bits and pieces for my dollhouses but not just for current projects but for all my future projects that I was of course going to do... but have yet to do. Sometimes too much stuff is just plain old overwhelming.

3) After the work is done, do you clean up after each piece, after each day or whenever you can´t find the

table any more?

At the current time, I've managed to convince my long suffering husband that the dining room was a waste of space and that it needed to be converted into a "family room". So away the dining room table and 6 chairs went, stored in our garage until we use it again some day. We bought a small table to eat off of and the rest of the room is now mine. I have a 2 seater red sofa (my favorite color is red) where I do most of my crafting at the moment. Currently I'm working on a lot of crochet. A blanket for our bed so it's a lot of squares! I have an armoire in which I've got stuff from various hobbies stashed. It's totally overstuffed and I've been going vertical with my stash. I'm surprised my armoire hasn't collapsed to be honest. I need to clear some stuff out one of these days but that cuts into my already sparse crafting time so it's not a priority. If I need a table to work on, I use the little round table which means I have to clear it all up in time for meals. Sometimes though I don't want to stop and put stuff away so the kids end up eating in the living room upstairs but I've told them it's super cool and that it's like an indoor picnic. Now they ask me if they can have an indoor picnic everyday.

Thank you so very much for sharing your personal art story and your creative space Marja! You can find Marja at Daily Drivel.

If you learn more about creative spaces you may visit Quinn McDonald´s, BJ LAntz´s and Donna´s.