Fibre Studio Makeover
The name Tiny Fibre Studio was coined while I was saving for a house deposit and dreaming of what my future fibre studio might be like. I knew one thing. On my budget, it would be a very small fibre studio. Tiny, in fact.
As it turned out, not only was it tiny, it was also a very strange shape, which also doubles as a sort of second living room because it has a better view. Furnishing the fibre studio called for some detailed planning and clever storage solutions to keep everything in its place.
This blog post accompanies the videos linked below so if you want to see the full transformation, check those videos out!
The entire house is a weird shape, and I knew the best way to keep it looking as spacious as possible was to only have furniture with legs. Because you can see under it, it doesn’t look like the furniture takes up as much space. That led me to realising that I have a love for original, mid-century furniture. The vast majority of it is on legs, it has far more character than modern pieces (in my opinion!) and that stuff was built to last.
So when I first moved in, I re-homed all but a few pieces of my old furniture and decided to gradually source the rest secondhand.
One of the items of furniture I’d kept to tide me over until I could kit the place out the way I really wanted was an IKEA Kallax unit. Now this might be an unpopular opinion but I hated this for fibre storage! Sure, you can cram a LOT of fibre in there but even though the boxes were labelled, I could never find anything and I’d end up having to unpack the entire box to find what I needed. If I were still using Kallax, I’d take a look at the new ‘Pansartax’ boxes IKEA launched in 2023 as it looks like two of the half-height versions would make more efficient use of the space in a Kallax cube.
So I started to plan a fibre studio with a seating area, TV, lots of fibre storage and a fibre prep table. Ambitious? Maybe, but I was confident that furniture designers of 50 years past would have the answers. Many of these pieces were picked up for very reasonable prices but there were definitely some investment pieces. I’ve tried to suggest some other alternatives if the style doesn’t suit you or it’s out of your budget.
The first piece I added a set of GPlan nested tables from their Quadrille range (less than £10 on Facebook Marketplace). Two are in the fibre studio — one to hold my tea, one to hold the miniSpinner!) and one is used in the living room. I then found the glass-fronted cabinet (by Beaver and Tapley) which came from a local vintage shop and it’s a great fit for that space. I added UV protective film to the glass so I could fill the top section with some of my yarn, while my miniSpinner lives in the lower section.
Then I had the dilemma of what to do with the narrow end of the room. By this time I had discovered Ladderax, a modular system of furniture created by Robert Heal for Staples of Cricklewood (not the stationery store!) in 1964. The concept was really simple — a single unit comprised of two metal ladders onto which you’d slot brass bars connecting the two ladders. The shelf and cabinet elements have grooves on the bottom which slot on to those brass bars. Shelves and cabinets came in two main lengths and customers could custom-build the configuration they wanted.
I measured up and was disappointed that only the 58cm/1ft 11” unit would fit at the narrow end of the room. Then I had a brainwave and realised the ladders came in two variants — one designed to lean against a wall and one to be used freestanding. I didn’t necessarily have to put the unit right up against the wall… so there’s actually a 20cm/8” gap between the TV unit and the wall but it gives me more storage and looks more in proportion with the rest of the room.
After a considerable amount of debate and Procreate mock-ups, I went for two 89cm/2ft 11” units with three wood sliding door cabinets (all of my fibre is stored in ziplock style bags for protection from moths, so I don’t want to look at plastic all day!), one three-drawer chest, a drop-leaf storage cabinet and a shelf. These were ordered from vintageretro.co.uk and I’ve since ordered another configuration for my office from Just Ladderax on Instagram — both great sellers who kindly allowed me to build my own configuration from their available stock.
IKEA’s IVAR range has a similar modular principle and they’ve just released some sliding door cabinets so you can now configure something very similar with that system. In fact that’s what I use in another room.
The drop-front cabinet holds my fibre prep tools and ‘fibre for blending’ stash. The drum carder is stored on top of the unit when not in use.
In the three-drawer unit I store all the accessories for my wheels. Hansencrafts in the top drawer, Schacht in the middle drawer and skeining/winding tools in the bottom. I use IKEA Raggisar drawer dividers to keep everything organised, not just here but in drawers all over the house!
Braids of fibre are stacked in the sliding door cabinets and it’s now easy to find what I’m looking for. I have all my handdyed braids in one cabinet, blended tops in another and naturally-coloured fibres in the other.
I’ve since added the narrowest Billy bookcase next to my armchair, positioned at an angle since the corner isn’t 90º anyway and it’s more usable that way… even if I had to cut a section of skirting board out to fit it in there!
