More Classes and Bear Paw Quilts

I’ve got two more serger classes on the schedule for this month. I’ll be teaching a Serger 101 class at Glacier Quilts on March 15 from 10-1, and the Bundling Up Baby class (making baby items on the serger) on March 22 from 10-1. We’ll see if they fill, as two weeks isn’t a lot of lead time, but at least customers will know that the store is offering them. We can always bump them to April or May.

When I was at DD#2’s last week and we were discussing rescheduling my trip to visit her, I mentioned that I had more serger classes coming up. She said, “I thought you retired from teaching.” I traveled quite a bit when the girls were younger—teaching at The Knitting Guild of America conferences, at Stitches, and for various guilds and stores around the country, but my last trip was in 2011 (I think) when I taught at The Yarn Barn in Lawrence, Kansas. I had already started my transcription job by then. I do love teaching, although I never expected I would be teaching serger classes.

We got another round of rain and sleet overnight. The temperature is hovering right around 31 degrees. It’s a mess out there. I’d be happy to stay put and sew, but I have a haircut appointment at noon. I’m hoping the roads are clear by then. The husband’s new computer is also waiting to be picked up and I have some book orders to mail out.

He’s been puttering around out in his shop and showing off his new truck to the neighbors who’ve stopped by. I joked that if we sold tickets, we could probably pay it off in short order. He got a call from Liberty Mutual yesterday—Safeco’s parent company—and they said that they will not contest the claim. They needed his statement, because he was the only one involved who saw the whole thing happen, but they are accepting responsibility. Now we just wait to see what the compensation is going to be.

I made another Bear Paw baby quilt top yesterday. These colors are reasonably accurate:

I also finished binding the red Candy Coated. I am going to start working on the sashing for the Sunbonnet Sue quilt so I can get that one put together.

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I had an e-mail from Joann Fabrics in my inbox this morning, highlighting all the new inventory. I was curious, so I clicked on the link. I did not look at all 84,948 items, but I did see a few that were noteworthy. The most surprising news is that Joanns is now an authorized retailer for Liberty Fabrics (Tana Lawn).

I will be curious to see if the store here gets any stock, although this probably isn’t anything I would add to my stash.

I looked at the new juvenile knits, some of which are cute, some of which look like the designers threw together a bunch of random graphics. (The latter ones will, no doubt, end up in the clearance bin in another six months, just like the current crop of ugly knit prints. I told my T-shirt class students to go stock up on those clearance fabrics for making muslins to test their self-drafted patterns.) Joann’s line of juvenile knits really have me scratching my head. They could do a brisk business in baby and juvenile knits if they offered cute prints that were appropriately scaled for smaller clothing. I sometimes wonder if the designers and the buyers even know how to sew, or if they are just employees sitting at their computers, completely divorced from the desires of their end users. Part of what makes DD#2 so good at her job with Nordstrom is that she loves fashion and has a refined sense of style. She knows what is going to sell. If I were a fabric designer for a major retailer, my goal would be to design fabrics that were so adorable that there would be nothing left to put in the clearance bin at the end of the season.

Common sense, I think, but as one of my friends in the craft co-op says, “If common sense were lard, some folks wouldn’t have enough to grease the pan.”