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Great APQS Longarm Giveaway winner update: Finding space for a longarm
To sign up for the Great APQS Longarm Giveaway, sign up here.
It’s funny – we lust after rooms showcased in home magazines with perfectly placed furniture, properly hung paintings, and pretty pillows popping just the right amount of color in a room. What they don’t show are all of the “before” shots when that room contained mismatched end tables, garage sale chairs, and pillows sewn during 10th grade home economics class! While the glossy pages reflect an ideal “dream” setting, most of us would be so stressed about keeping everything up we’d forget that we’re actually supposed to live in the house!
The same holds true for quilting studios. Lots of quilters stop by our booth at quilt shows and dream of a perfect quilting studio including a longarm machine. They love quilting and all the joy it brings to their lives, but lament about not having the space for one. But an APQS longarm that will easily do queen-size quilts only takes up a footprint of 5 feet by 10 feet! To comfortably work around the frame, a space of around 8 feet by 11 or 12 feet is more than enough room to make a dream come true.
Sometimes we have to make a decision to “live” in our house, and not let our house run our lives. Many homes have a formal living room that serves as the place where guests simply drop their coats on the way to the cozier kitchen. How about converting that to your longarm studio? Small spare bedrooms can accommodate a longarm frame. Resourceful APQS owners have even tucked one end of their frame inside part of the closet after removing the sliding doors!
Haven’t sat on that enclosed front or back porch for a while? There you go…longarm studio! Perhaps you’ve got a storage room bursting with boxes you haven’t opened since the Carter era. Time to clean house—if you haven’t needed it now you never will, and those quilt tops are calling you!
If you think it can’t be done, take a look at the “before” and “after” photos below that show Corintha Russell’s studio, winner of the APQS Longarm Giveaway. Corintha decided that she was going to “find” room for a longarm, even before she actually won an APQS Freddie! She and her nephew worked on her vision, and converted a basement storage area into her dream studio. A dark space that stored rarely used things soon became a sunny retreat any quilter would love!
Since an APQS machine only requires as much power as a normal household iron, you don’t need to re-wire anything in your space. Of course, you might want to add an extra light or two and get rid of that single 60-watt bulb, but the LED lights on an APQS machine will shine brightly on your quilt to see what you’re doing.
Take a look around your home again…do you really need that formal living room to entertain, or do you just keep busy dusting the furniture in it once a week? Are there boxes of stuff that would be useful to someone else instead of taking up space in your storage area? Do you really need that guest room for the two weeks a year your kids come to visit, or could a couple of blow up airbeds do the trick on the family room floor? Hmmm….getting to quilt my own quilts 365 days a year vs. kids on air mattresses 14 days a year (or in a hotel so I don’t have to clean up—even better!) The choice is becoming clear…:)
We’d love to see some of photos of YOUR space—what have you done to make your house a “quilting home” Where will an APQS Millennium live if YOU win in the next APQS Great Longarm Giveaway?
