For today's Sewing Space Tour, where we peek behind the closed doors at a crafter's inspiring sewing space, we're in East London with Hannah and Rosie, the talented sewists and business partners behind the sewing studio and workshop haven The New Craft House.
Hannah and Rosie are well known for their variety of interesting workshops and of course their excellent sewing parties! Over to the ladies...
Hello! We’re Hannah and Rosie and we run The New Craft House. We have a studio in a railway arch in Hackney, London where we run lots of sewing workshops. We also host Pop Up fabric stores, organise our famous sewist parties and teach private classes. As well as teaching our own classes like Bra Making, Learn to Sew Swimwear and Jeans Making we also host other well-known sewists and businesses like Heather Lou from Closet Case Patterns, Elisalex from By Hand London, and Saara and Laura from Named Clothing to run workshops. Our studio gets a LOT of use!
We’re very lucky to have a studio where we can surround ourselves with all of our sewing supplies. We both love East London so knew we wanted to be based around here and the studio is super light and spacious - great for sewing! We both live on narrowboats and there are lots of waterways out East for us to call home, so we’re often moored really close to the studio.
We run our business from the studio and spend most of our time listing new workshops, sorting out upcoming classes, sewing workshop samples or posting out orders, but we also manage to sneak in a bit of selfish sewing time! Rosie has been sewing some maternity things lately and Hannah has made lots of merino turtlenecks ready for Autumn.
As we both run off solar on our narrowboats, we don’t use our sewing machines there. We use our evenings to knit, do English Paper Piecing, embroider and prep pattern pieces. Bra pieces are made for narrowboats because they’re so small you can easily cut them at your dinner table. Bra Making is still one of our most popular classes and we love teaching people how to make their own well-fitting bras - it’s really empowering.
West Elm kindly offered to furnish our studio for us which was amazing! Having a nice desk and a comfortable chair is essential for productivity, especially when you’re sewing a lot. We also got some of their ceramic planters, big tables for workshops and an amazing sideboard where we serve drinks and snacks in classes. To go alongside our West Elm furniture we picked up some pieces from IKEA to pull everything together, including some peg boards which are super handy AND pretty.
We’re still in the process of finishing decorating and we’d like more prints to hang and a lot more plants. I think we have quite a similar style to each other and we’re both set on creating an inspiring, creative space where workshop attendees feel welcome. We spend a lot of time in here so it’s so important to make it a nice place for us to spend time too.
We’re not the most organised people! The peg boards have really helped with storing scissors and other sewing supplies and of course we’ve got one of those IKEA trolleys for wheeling out when we’re sewing! How could you have a sewing room without one?!
We have a very established sewing ritual. We make tea, get a nice sweet treat and then put on some trashy TV - and we’re talking seriously trashy reality shows. We’re also big podcast listeners - Stitcher’s Brew and Love To Sew are our favourites. Hannah’s dog Twigs is our studio companion although she spends most of her time asleep in the corner.
We love our studio and we love welcoming lots of different people from all over the world into our space. Have a look at all of our upcoming classes and perhaps we’ll see you here soon too!
Thank you Hannah and Rosie for showing us around your bright and brilliant sewing studio!
We've loved seeing behind the scenes at the New Craft House and we can't wait to see what workshops will be announced next :) Our Louise and Jenny have attended the bra making and the swim wear classes and loved them and Tilly has been to the jeans making workshop with Heather Lou!
Have you seen the rest of our Sewing Space Tours? Head over and check them out!
