i have cans in my studio.

I have fluorescent lighting in my sewing area, I like all of the light it gives me for sewing and cutting. Have side lighting on the walls as well, I can turn these on too.
My sewing is in the basement too, lucky for me, there was a pool table sitting in this area some years ago, so the good lighting was not for my hobby. No matter the reason it is good light to work under.

Main lighting in the room for general work and specific lighting at each work station. Have the areas controlled by their own switches so that you don't have to burn electricity if you're not using an area. The adjustable track lights are very good for lighting by your machine.

You should consider using LED lighting in the recessed lighting if you go that route. The LED lighting is nice and bright, uses less electricity (more money for fabric!) and they last many times longer than flourescent. For me that's the key part because I'm pretty short and I don't do ladders, and neither does my husband. They are more expensive initially but the price has come down a lot.

Enjoy your new room!

I have fluorescent lights and then also use an ott light over my sewing area. Never can have enough light!

My 10 x 13 sewing room has a centeral overhead fan with 4 posable lights, then I have 2 track lights with 4 light units on each mounted on the ceiling of the west and south areas with a good size window over the south side of the room. along with 2 lights (over needle and throat area) on my Pfaff, it seems to work well for me. I do use my free standing Ott light for hand work. So many options out there - I wish you luck on pulling the right arangement(s) together for your sewing needs.

How's your Ott light doing? My partner and I bought desk styles a few years ago, but neither one worked at all. We returned them and bought two floor style ones, and they didn't work, either! We got tired of returning them, and gave up.

I'd like to try again, but now those coil-type light bulbs seem to be so good that I wonder if Ott lights are still worth their expense?

I don't have an OTT, but hear that it's the cat's meow, and honestly, when I've tried it in stores, I haven't really noticed it as being superb.

So now you have me curious? do you mean didn't work as in not at all ... or didn't work as in not giving you enough light to be worthwhile?

I have track type fixtures in my sewing area. I like them because you can adjust the 4 lights in each of them every which way. I also have floor ott lights that shine directly on my sewing machine areas. They didn't do the trick for overall light in the room so we added the track fixtures- perfect now!

They didn't work at all. They didn't turn on. The first time we bought them we also purchased extra bulbs, and the lamps would not turn on with the other bulbs, either. We suspected that the lamps must have been damaged in shipment.

It was months later (although from the same JoAnn's, so may have been same shipment) that we tried again, this time with the floor models, but we had the same problem, so we gave up. I haven't tried again.