Need a Needle? Which One?

I taught a class on machine needles to five students Wednesday evening. I think it went well. I came prepared with a selection of fabrics from my stash. The students were given a 10-pack of assorted needles (Schmetz) and they sewed using needles on different fabrics to see what worked and what didn’t. Gone are the days when needles came in two flavors: red band for wovens and yellow band (ball point) for knits. Now there are Microtex, universal, embroidery, quilting, metallic, jeans, vinyl, jersey and stretch. (Yes, there is a difference between jersey and stretch—stretch needles are specially designed for fabrics containing spandex.)

The store owner’s son—who is the machine tech—was one of the students. I love having him in class because he asks such great questions. He doesn’t sew much, although we told him we need to change that.

The one downside to teaching classes locally is that I feel like I am constantly prepping new classes, and that takes a fair bit of work. When I taught for Stitches and TKGA, I could develop a class and teach it half a dozen times over the following year or two. With the exception of the Jalie Renee pants, which I’ve taught three times, each store class is new and usually taught only once.

I will be teaching the Sinclair Patterns Harper Cardigan and the Love Notions Laundry Day Tee in September and October. I contacted both companies for permission and both were very gracious about giving it.

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Every August, I meet with our accountant to do a quick review of the year to date. That helps to avoid any end-of-the-year surprises. We met yesterday morning. I will say that the one benefit of having to use QuickBooks Online is that now he has immediate access to our records. I gave him the login information so he could make the general journal entries for 2022. I also told him he was welcome to clean up whatever messes he saw in there. He said I do an amazing job for not having any formal bookkeeper training, but I know there are things that could be tightened up.

[I may not have any formal training, but I have a pathological need to track everything down to the last penny, so I learned what I had to in order to do that.]

The husband and I planned, at the beginning of 2023, for him to get another new work truck this year. The 2014 truck was totaled in the accident in February 2022 and was mostly replaced by the insurance payout. His backup truck is a 2008. He ordered a new cab-and-chassis truck in March—it had to be built at the factory in Mexico—and we were notified in June that it was being shipped to the dealer in Tacoma. Once it gets to the dealer, it will be an additional few weeks of waiting while the racks and toolboxes are installed.

The truck is stuck on a rail car, apparently, somewhere between Mexico and Tacoma, with no firm delivery date.

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One of my rituals is to spend a bit of time on Pinterest on my iPad before going to sleep. I have this strange belief that doing so primes the creative pump in my brain. Last night, this pattern popped up in my feed:

I bought a top at the Soft Surroundings store in Seattle last year that I’d love to copy. I could reverse engineer it, but this pattern is for an almost-identical top. I’d be delighted not to have to reinvent the wheel.

I read a blog post yesterday where the sewist talked about spending so much time drafting and altering patterns that she didn’t feel like sewing. I am bogged down in the midst of that, too. I am burning through Pellon Easy-Pattern tracing paper at an alarming rate. Even some of my T&T patterns from last year have been re-traced, mostly to drop the waistline down where it should be according to my bodice sloper. I keep telling myself that all of this is adding to my store of knowledge, but it would be nice to turn some of these chunks of fabric into things I can wear. Hopefully the sew-jo comes back from walkabout soon.

Our lovely cooler weather is coming to an end. Temps will be up in the 90s again by the beginning of next week. We have visitors coming tomorrow, which gives me a great excuse to spend the day cleaning. This is a busy weekend for church activities, too.