workspaces: a new series

Welcome to a new post series: Work Spaces! I will be sharing different workspaces of other bloggers/crafters/shop owners I have "met" via blogland or etsy once a week for the next several weeks. 

Today, I am excited to introduce Iara of Baers Garten and her workspace. Iara creates beautiful mini album kits (I snagged this gorgeous kit a couple weeks ago and love it), journaling cards and embellishments, and also creates digital scrapbooking kits.

1. Tell us about yourself and your creativity - ie. what you make or do, what you blog about, your history behind your creativity, etc. Hi, my name is Iara and I am the artist behind Baers Garten Designs. I am a former scientist, now WAHM to two girls and a boy. I am Brazilian but live overseas since 2000. After some years of globetrotting, our family now lives in a small town near to Cologne, Germany.

I am a memory keeper. I love to write down the everyday tales of my family and things I want to remember. I scrapbook, I write art journals but mostly, I love to make mini albums. I have the dream of creating mini album kits combining my digital designs and the beautiful products from my favorite manufactures for a long time and this dream has come true recently with the openning of my etsy shop. I love the process of creating a series of embellishments with a special theme in mind and having the final product in my hands. I love to create digital kits too but there is nothing like touching your creations.

I started my way into the world of scrapbooking through website decoration. I started designing such graphics in 2002 and had lots of customers who wrote that they used my graphics for scrapbooking. When I was pregnant with my daughter I decided to make a pregnancy album and found two peas in a bucket. I was sold :) In 2006 I started designing for digital scrapbooking. Please be sure to visit my digital store to give a look in my digital designs :)

2. Tell us about your workspace. My workspace is a dream come true to me. After years of creating and scrapping in a small desk in my bedroom and having all of my supplies stored in boxes in my closet I now have a room for my own, which is not very high, hot in the Summer and cold in the Winter, lol, but all mine. My husband built it for me under our roof last year. I love this place so much. As it is located under the roof it does not have high walls to put bookshelves for my supplies - I really would love to own a expedit :) -  so every corner must be planned and furniture may adapt. I have a very large desk, in fact it is our former dinning table: I convinced my husband that we needed a larger table to accomodate our family of five and guests and when he asked what we should do with our former table he knew that he did not have a choice ;) The table is quite wide so I created a small shelf to have my everyday supplies close to me as organized as possible. For storage, we cutt some old shelves and adapted them to fit in the "dead space" on the floor. It is really stunning how much it holds: there are enough place for albums, books, boxes of small supplies, my journals, magazines, canvas, kids at supplies... it is everything there. These shelves used to be in our living room when we moved together 12 years ago. I love to re-use that furniture and to keep it in the "family" :)

3. What is your favorite thing about your workspace? There are lots of things I love about my work space: the amount of natural light - there are windows in both sides and is always beautiful there, even in the gray days. I love that it is big enough to have a place for a second desk for my kids, and I love to have a dedicated sewing corner and that I do not need to close the sewing machine and put it away after every project (as I did for years). I am very grateful for my studio.

4. What is one thing you can't live without in your workspace? I can't live without my two Alex drawers from Ikea. I have an Alex and a Vika Alex with casters. They hold my papers, my punches, my stamps, my embellishments... everything is so organized thanks to them. I just open a drawer and find what I want to use, I use it and put back in the drawer, this way I always have an almost clean desk. I am a very organized person, a messy desk makes me crazy. And when I am ready I can put them under my table/desk.

Check out Iara's etsy shop here. Or stay up-to-date via Facebook here. And don't forget to check out her blog here - she shares tons of inspiration there :) *All images courtesy of Iara of Baers Garten.