Hello and welcome to my studio! Something I’ve always wanted to have and managed to get when we extended our little bungalow by one room, so what would’ve been a spare room was quickly nabbed and made into the studio (friends can stay on the sofa, it’s lovely and comfy). A few years ago I bought some lovely brass animal pieces on Etsy to use for decorating bags, and one of the bees made it onto the studio door with a little ‘busy’ sign above it. Now, I am partial to a 2-3 hour nap when needed, and I just like sleeping in general, I’m not a morning person at all. So when Gav saw the ‘busy’ sign he just pointed and laughed and said I’m more of a sleepy bee than a busy one. I was mildly insulted but let it go as he was totally correct, but the name stuck and after going through many names for the business we decided to go for Sleepy Bee Studio.
I have Ikea to thank, as I love a good Ikea hack, for the majority of the furniture in the studio. I knew I wanted to have picture rails surrounding the room to display both work and my own personal art and bits and pieces collected over the years. Plus if I ever try to organise things and put them in boxes I then completely forget about them, so figured if I keep as much as possible on display then it’s easy to find and inspire me for new products.
The little honeycomb wall was from a set of 6 cork tiles I found on Amazon, and as I’m a fan of grey I decided to cover them all with grey felt then use that little area to pin up colour swatches, photos, dried flowers, all sorts really.
The state of tidiness in the image below isn’t exactly a true representation of how the studio looks most days! It’s usually complete chaos by noon; I have a remarkable knack for making a room look like a tornado has hit it, which makes my OCD husband cry inside. So I end up tidying the room a few times a day, also have to clean the desk about half a dozen times due to our cat Mister Miaow (he miaows to an abnormal degree so it just made sense) needing to be totally involved in what I’m doing and always leaving me with the lovely gift of his cat fur all over the desk. He’s kind like that.
As you’ll see it’s not a huge space, the desk is pretty big so takes up a lot of room and so stock has already begun to migrate around the house; so the dream is to one day get a studio built at the bottom of the garden. Fingers crossed!