So posting in these parts has been sporadic at best, but don’t you think I’ve been sitting on my laurels. Stuff has been getting done here, you hear?!

Have I ever mentioned that I have a carpenter? I do. He’s done a lot of work on a house we have up north and has become a good friend, so it only seemed fitting that I’d impose with a request for a sewing table, no? Yes.

At the tail end of last year I sketched an embarrassingly unskilled sketch of what I had in mind, and sent Mario a shitty picture of this shitty sketch on whatsApp, and then the Germ tried to explain to him auf Deutsch what the bizarre assortment of lines was supposed to represent.

If you thought I was joking, you grossly overestimate me.

In February when we were up north for a visit I took my machine in for measurements and a slightly more refined plan was hatched. In April, Mario arrived with his tools and a massive work surface, and he and the Germ got to work assembling it. I watched from the cat tree, in awe.

Faces hidden to protect the innocent.

The cats, having been displaced, hopped onto the pieces for a nap.

What are you lookin’ at?

And soon enough, I had this:

Magic, is it not?!

The table is about three meters long and a meter wide, with a drop-down slot for the machine. The back has another half-meter extension, making for a huge table on which I can fairly easily lay out a large quilt for quilting.

Magic!

The whole thing is on wheels (except the extension legs, which fold up when not in use, so I can move the table to the middle of the room if I want to, like I did when a couple of friends came over to sew with me a while back.

When I don’t have a huge quilt on it, there is enough space for my large cutting mat and for a squillion other things that can rest to the right of the machine without interfering with any sewing. I usually have my ironing board to my right at table height so I don’t have to keep getting up to “press” (let’s all pretend that I don’t iron).

So sounds great, right? It is, but… There are a couple of issued with it that need to be tweaked that I hadn’t anticipated.

The first is that my sewing machine has a slightly curved surface, which means that it isn’t flush with the table. This means that when I’m piecing, the pieces sometimes get scrunched up in the gap between the surfaces. This could probably be fixed with a customized Perspex surface, or I could try placing the surface of my old Janome extension table on top of the table in that spot for a slightly raised, but smooth surface. I’ll need to find a way to affix it to the table to prevent it from sliding. At the moment this isn’t bothering me enough to worry about it.

The second is that it turns out that the extension is a bit too heavy for the back wheels to support, so they bent, making it difficult to wheel the table around. I’ve removed them and my carpenter will reassess what we can do about it.

What does your sewing surface look like? Would you invest in a custom piece?