It's Easy to Set Up a Creative Workspace in Your Home

Creative space from blog Soul PrettyNova Bronstein - If you're anything like me and Sheffield School jewelry design instructor Haley Mindes, you look forward to a shopping trip to a bead or craft store more than the mall. If so, you may already have an area in your home carved out for creating. Below you'll find some key elements that come into play in setting up a work space that's not only functional but also inspiring, encouraging you to sit down and create more often. Haley's told me what she thought better organization was all about.

I'd like to say that organization is the major contributor to my imaginative process - but in actuality, the messier my space, the more creative I'm being. If my work area is cleaned up it means I have completed a project or company is coming over! 

We all have projects we've been “meaning” to get to. Having a workspace that inspires you may have you sitting down to start on those projects sooner than later. Your work area may be on your dining room table, at a corner desk, or in a dedicated room that you can close the door to (lucky you, with no constant cleanup!). Haley and I hope that Corner desk by Martha Stewart on Home Depotthese tips will help you to create or improve your work space, and have you excited to sit down and start making!

Organization

Make it easy for yourself. Keeping organized means that you don’t have to spend lots of time hunting down what you need. You'll waste less time searching for things if they're always put away in the same place when you're not using them. Recycled glass jars, a magnetic spice rack, and pinned or clipped buckets or fabric bags can be great for storage.

Organizing your beads or other craft supplies in see-through containers or tucking away materials you may plan to use someday (but not today) in drawers or on shelves in baskets or boxes can also clear up clutter on your work surface, maximizing your actual work space. Plus, decluttering can have a powerful effect on your productivity, as it's a pleasure to sit down to work. 

Photo: Everything Etsy

Dedicated Space

Knowing that you have a dedicated place of your own where you can have some quiet time - not a shared space - will help you relax and let creative thoughts flow. Getting lost in a project can be a form of meditation. If possible, you want this space to be only devoted to creating. The goal is to make it so that when you sit down to work, you associate the space purely with your creative process. That means that you don’t associate this space with chores like paying the bills. Associating this spot with paying bills can block your creative juices! 

 Photo: Retro-Modern Project

Inspiration

Surround yourself with things that will inspire you! You may find yourself with some unexpected time on your hands, but when you sit down to work, you might feel like a blank canvas. Have images available that inspire you; they will give you a place to start. Here's what I do for inspiration.

I keep a big cork board behind my work bench covered with images I like at the moment, and I change them whenever I'm working on a new collection. I pull images of architecture, landscapes, fashion spreads, and nature and use the shapes, textures, and color palettes as my starting points. I prefer to use non-jewelry images so that I'm challenged to interpret whatever it is that I'm looking at through my own lens, finding my own voice for how it translates into a jewelry element. 

Remember, inspiration and your creative process can start anywhere. You can be working on a full-fledged project that you take to fruition, or you can just play with making samples, it’s all progress and can lead to great work. You can always revisit what you've made at a later date and a with fresh perspective! So, don't forget to sometimes put judgement on pause.

Photo: We Heart It

Build your ideal work space. It's a creative process in and of itself, and the very act of defining your work space will lead to your creative growth. And take your time. There's no rush to get everything perfect. It's not a race; it's a journey! 

Interested in making some of your own smashing jewelry? As jewelry design Instructors at the Sheffield School in New York, Haley and I encourage you to take control and rev up your creativity! Check out the newly launched Jewelry Design Course offered at the Sheffield School. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any other school in the world.

• Request a free Sheffield School catalog describing our distance education courses.
• Subscribe to the Sheffield Designer newsletter.

Grow Up and Buy a New Bed - Fresh Fix for Your Bedroom

Jay Johnson - If you're an interior designer, one of the challenges you face is helping your client "move on." And moving on can take on several forms: move on from the furnishings you had in your college dorm room (no, it's not okay to use old orange crates and stacks of bricks for bookshelves), move on past the hideous furniture you inherited when Aunt Opal passed away last year (sometimes furniture should be buried with their owners), or move on beyond bad taste to good taste ("But it was on sale!" is not a good reason to keep anything revolting).

Sometimes replacing one key piece of furniture in a room is enough to tip the decorating scheme from dreadful to daring ... and I've selected 11 beds (actually 10 beds and 1 headboard) that could turn an ugly bedroom into a showplace, or at least inspire the rest of the room to shape up and match the new bed's high standards. The photo above and the next two photos feature beds from the hipsters at Atelier Interior Design - the Nuba bed (top), Giorgia bed (top, below), and Bridge bed (bottom, below) are all beds that could drastically change the temperature and style quotient of any bedroom. 

I love how the Atelier beds would look great floating in a room. Bed design trends are moving away from the flat-against-the-wall restrictions of beds of yore; a floating position allows the Bridge bed's split headboard to adjust to different levels of recline to accommodate different reading, sleeping, or TV-watching postures. Very smart. 

And consider the Antalya Queen bed from McGuire Furniture (above). Its rattan woven frame is covered in laced rawhide for a strong statement not often made in bedrooms. This would be a great choice for both contemporary and traditional bedrooms.

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