My home office occupies a spacious corner in a long narrow room built as a bowling alley in 1904. I’ve used odds and ends of IKEA shelving and salvaged storage units to decisively mark off my own chunk of the room. Every pocket of potential storage has been further carved up with all manner of boxes, bins, and subdividers. I call my office “The Nest”; my neatnik husband Abbott calls it “A Thousand Plateaus.”
To add a little order, I draped a piece of fabric over an end table, concealing the profusion of stuff stashed underneath. In another part of the room, I tacked a piece a fabric over the back of a desk to hide all the cords and mess under my daughter’s sewing machine.
These simple ideas for using fabric to quickly conceal clutter take their cue from none other than Martha Stewart, whose web site recently featured an array of “fun and easy decorating ideas” for those of us gamely trying to tidy our spaces at the start of the New Year. While putting ruffled curtains on a book shelf exceeds the limits of both my sewing skills and my frill tolerance, draping fabric over the edge of a table is something I can live with.
— Ellen Lupton · 2009-01-17
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THE BOOK