Welcome to my piece of heaven. It may not be perfect but it’s mine and I love it. I don’t have a dedicated craft room where I can make a mess and shut the door – reality is that my work space is in my living room. Yip! In your face all the time! You see my real craft space is built attached to the garage and house, but it lacks the very important part of uhm a roof and a door. So let’s just leave it at that. Instead here’s a little tour of where I spend most of my days…

I have a large work table that used to be joined by another vintage huge table until I recently split them up because the more space I had the more I would fill it up. So now I am confined to scrapping on the one table and have dedicated the other table to my Cricut Machine. In front of my desk is a bench my brother made years ago with fluffy pillows and a nice soft comfy seat and throw – it forms part of the lounge area and also conveniently hides the mess sunder my desk (blush it’s true).

Behind my desk is another large cupboard filled with my other most used stuff and overflow stuff like adhesives, melt art, chipboard letters, ink pads and plastic packets. To the left of the cupboard is a small unit with my printers on and underneath my buttons sorted by colour in jars and a large tin box with my punches in.

My laptop is towards the left of the table on the edge – I am able to do what I need! And if I look to the right from my computer I am in the lounge. Very convenient!

On my desk are 3 jars of washi tapes sorted by colours of course for visual prettiness. I only keep my most used tools on there and that includes my paper piercer and sewing stuff and a basket of my favourite and most used stamps. The rest of my stamps are stored in our bedroom in a chest of drawers. My acrylic and cling mount stamps now live in the unit you will shortly see.

This ugly and hopefully soon to be painted and distressed unit and its friend houses my most used stuff. I have acquired a couple of recycled and repurposed vintage ammunition (yes as in bullet) crates. I added pretty handles to them and tied a descriptive tag to each of them with the contents. They hold my inks, Mister Huey’s Mists, AC embossing powders, microbeads, glitter glues, 6×6 paper pads, distress ink pads, blank tags, adhesives etc.

In the plastic containers (DVD storage) I have clear CD cases with my acrylic stamps inside. I recently took on this mammoth task to remove them from their packaging and started labelling them by Manufacturer and still need to do the type (maybe). It makes life easier as they are now all located in one spot and looking very neat I must add. Maybe now some of those will actually get used.

Storage baskets and pretty pottery pots make me happy!

I love how the wooden crates enable me to pull it out of the cupboard and place it on my desk – once I am done it all goes neatly back – out of sight! Since everything is always in your face it is important for me to try and keep everything nice and neat! Did I just say that? Let me assure you – it doesn’t always happen!

To the left of my work table I have a trolley unit with lots of space front and back. The back hides stuff! And the front keeps my most used elements, blings and some albums with new layouts in them.

I keep my diamante in salt and pepper jars. Only the small ones though as they are the ones I use most. Plus the colours make for a pretty visual adding some colour that is not that overwhelming. Behind my diamante is some Tupperware dedicated to the different companies I love working with like Teresa Collins, Glitz, BasicGrey etc. Each tub holds smaller chipboard elements, tags, one of stickers etc. the stuff that always seem to float around because their friends have been used. It is nice and neat all together and easy enough to pull out and scratch through.

In the opposite corner of the lounge is a drawer unit also on wheels (I move stuff around a lot). On top is a pretty display with my paint brushes. In the drawers are my Cricut cartridges and other random stuff that still needs to be sorted.

Towards the right of the small drawer unit is an old cupboard that belonged to my late grandfather. He used it as a tool cupboard and then my brother used it as a grocery cupboard and now I am using it as a cupboard with stuff in it. In front of the cupboard you can see a glimpse of my Cricut machine on my other grandfathers’ old kitchen table I painted and distressed. And inside the cupboard are little displays of goodies in glass bottles alongside books and other stuff.

On the right of my table I have a pegboard that used to be in our kitchen when we first moved to the farm. My late father made it for my mom (I was 11 at the time). Since then I have hauled it out of storage and covered it in old book paper and sprayed the frame. It holds most of my new products used for design team projects. It needs some sorting again. Around the pegboard is a pretty string of lights just for fun.

And lastly without scaring you too much…is how it looked this morning before I literally threw everything of my desk to have the photos taken. Life around here is real and mostly messy – but it’s a creative mess, a good mess, our mess. I love my vintage French inspired space with its chandeliers, recycled and revamped furniture and lots of goodness.

And as a parting thought – I would love the perfect space I so often see in books and on blogs, but in reality how much of creating goes on in a perfect space? I would rather have a little space filled with creativity than a perfect space with lots of stuff and no creativity.

This article is meant to inspire you – thanks for visiting and now we want to see your space – perfect or imperfect – real spaces filled with creativity, dust and even a little mess.

Post by The Wholesaler’s Designer Jowilna Nolte.

We are very proud to introduce you to our first designer, Jowilna Nolte. Jowilna is a true creative and she will be sharing some of her passion and creativity with you.

Read more about Jowilna here.