All Coverstitch, All Day

I finished my class sample for the coverstitch class yesterday morning, and then I recorded next week’s podcast—the topic, of course, being coverstitch machines. I seem to have fallen into a pattern of using whatever I’m working on as the main topic for the podcast. The subject material is fresh in my mind and easy to talk about. I didn’t think I could blather on about coverstitch machines for 30+ minutes, but I did.

(I have a bit more to say about the podcast later on in this post.)

I made a sampler of what I want to teach in the coverstitch class:

From bottom to top:

  • A rolled-edge ruffle—the rolled edge was done on the serger—gathered with a chainstitch on the coverstitch machine and then stitched down to the background fabric with a two-needle narrow coverstitch over 3/8'' satin ribbon. I keep looking at that and thinking it would make a nice detail on the lower edge of an apron . . .

  • A two-needle wide coverstitch, looper side up, using 12wt Wonderfil Spagetti in the looper.

  • A stacked coverstitch—a la Gail Yellen—done by first making a two-needle wide coverstitch with 12wt Spagetti, then going over it with a different color Spagetti using a two-needle narrow coverstitch. A third pass could be added using a chain stitch (one needle).

  • Jumbo rickrack attached with a chainstitch using 12wt variegated thread in the looper.

  • Zipper insertion featuring, on the bottom, a decorative two-needle narrow coverstitch, looper side up. I had a little hiccup getting around the zipper pull because the coverstitch machine doesn’t have a true zipper foot. The top is a triple coverstitch (three needles), needle side up.

The sampler isn’t perfect, and it isn’t an actual project, but it gets the point across. If I have some time between now and the class next month, I would like to design some kind of zipper pouch to incorporate and show off these techniques. As it was, I was trying some of them for the first time. I have run into situations where class proposals require that the student make a project as part of learning a technique. I have mixed feelings about that. While it’s nice for students to be able to show off an item they have made, working on a “project” in class brings added pressure. Students tend to compare their projects and focus more on perfection than learning. This is an evening class and we may not even be able to get through all the techniques on the sampler, let alone make a zipper pouch. My goal is to introduce the techniques and inspire students to think about creative ways to use them. I know my students. They won’t disappoint me.

Class prep is a lot of work. That’s part of why I am happy to be teaching some of these classes at the stores in Missoula and Spokane, because if I am going to spend a day making class samples, I’d like to use them more than once. But now that I know what I want to teach in the class, I can make up the supply list and the handout.

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The podcast is having some (not unexpected) growing pains. Yesterday’s recording will be episode 8. I am happy with the analytics so far but I need to start recording some interviews. A podcast that consists of me blathering on for half an hour may not be sustainable.

I listened to an excellent podcast episode on the way to Seattle. The host was Toolman Tim Cook of Workshop Radio, who was also at the Self-Reliance Festival. Tim and his wife live in Alberta, which makes us almost neighbors. Tim has a great story and gives a talk at events about escaping the “poverty mindset.” He is also an all-around Nice Guy and a terrific podcast host. The topic of that episode was “content creation”—that’s the new buzzword—and his guests were Nicole Sauce (Living Free in Tennessee podcast), Brian Aleskivich from the LOTS Project, and Kyle Perrault of Backwoods Butcher. (Kyle did a pig butchering demo at SRF.)

My big takeaways from that content creator roundtable discussion were 1) consistency is huge and 2) it may take a couple dozen episodes before things really gel for a podcast. Nicole laughs about the fact that her first podcast episode had 87 downloads and the second episode had 14—of which she and her mother were two. That was eight years ago and now she’s hosting big events and being asked to present at conferences around the country. I have no such ambitions but the trajectory her life has taken is fascinating.

I do need to give some attention to my social media links for the podcast and get them organized such that posts automatically go up for each new episode. Even with as much frontloading as I did, I haven’t covered everything yet. I keep telling myself Rome wasn’t built in a day. This is a process. I am having fun with it and that’s the important part.