Come to Class

I traveled to Missoula yesterday to teach a serger mastery class. This is a free-to-students class for owners of Bernina sergers. (I get paid to teach it.) I left a bit early because I wasn’t sure what the roads would be like. As it turns out, the areas south of here got more snow than we did. Traffic was minimal, but I wasn’t traveling at my usual speed.

My class was at A Clean Stitch. The store has been in this strip mall for a couple of years, but it quickly outgrew its original location. Last spring, it moved down a few spots to a much larger space. The owners still have another 5000 square feet to organize and renovate into a service area and classroom space, so my class was in the main store area. Fortunately, it was a quiet day in the store.

Five students registered. Four came to class; the fifth decided not to travel because of the roads. One student thought that class ended at noon instead of 2 pm and had to leave for an appointment. Another student thought class ended at 1 pm and also had to leave. I crammed as much information into those two hours as I could for them, but we didn’t cover everything.

I don’t know what to think about these classes. Students sign up and don’t come, or come and leave early. I tell myself that as long as I am getting paid to teach the class, it’s not big deal for me, but the students are losing out. Maybe if they had to pay for a serger mastery class, they would be a bit more careful about getting their money’s worth. Or not. Sometimes that doesn’t seem to make a difference.

I’m scheduled to teach two more classes at this store—one in November and one in December—so we’ll see what happens with those.

I checked out the two Walmart stores on my route and both still had full remnant racks, which was gratifying.

We need a photo for the blog today, so here is one of the banners hanging up at church:

Isn’t that lovely? Ginger, who is in charge of visuals for our sanctuary, is so creative. I love walking into that space every Sunday morning and seeing what’s she done.

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I need to spend some time today on housekeeping. I’m going to start a roaster pan of chicken stock to cook down this morning. I’ll can it tomorrow afternoon. The husband is going to look at the washing machine (a Speed Queen) because it’s throwing an error code and stopping mid-cycle. He thinks the filter screen is plugged up. I have a few mountains of laundry to wash when that’s sorted.

The body shop called yesterday. The car would have been done yesterday afternoon, but they tried to put the new bumper on and realized that it was the wrong part. The attachment clips didn’t line up. They ordered the correct bumper, but it’ll be another week and a half before it gets here. In the meantime, they will repaint the old bumper and put it back on. The car should be ready Monday or Tuesday. I am not thrilled about having to take it back in a second time, but it is what it is.

My hot pink wide wale corduroys from Macy’s arrived this week. They fit nicely. I plan to wear them to church on Sunday and blind everyone. The bizarre thing is that the tag on the pants is in US sizing, so why they were posted with the weird 25-36 size range on the website is beyond me.

I have lost some fabric. I have a bin of wovens somewhere, but it is eluding my attempts to find it. I can even picture what fabrics are inside. I am pretty sure that it contains some Hobby Lobby bengaline, and now that I have this Linda pants pattern under control, I’d like to make a pair with that fabric. Part of me says that this is an indication that I have too much fabric, but the other part argues that I just need to label bins more clearly.