Parties and Presser Feet

It has been a busy couple of days. I was invited to the staff Christmas party at the quilt store on Monday, which was great fun. (The store is closed on Mondays.) We all brought projects to sew and spent the day eating and visiting. I worked on patterns. There is one pattern in particular that a few of us have been wrestling with. Marci, who works at the store, was trained as a professional patternmaker and brought her tools and knowledge with her to the party. She and I traced and measured and tried to come up with a solution. Ultimately, we concluded that this pattern needs more work than either of us wants to give it.

One of the other women who works at the store has this old Nancy Zieman coat pattern (princess seams!) and I am trying to decide if I want to add it to the queue. It’s out of print, but she would let me borrow it and trace it.

The pattern is designed for ponte and other stable knits. I’m not crazy about the collar, but I could change it.

The additional yard of the triple gauze fabric has been washed and dried and is waiting for me to finish the Tremont Jacket. I also took apart and altered both sleeve caps on the Chloe Coat and put the coat back together. That was easier than it sounds. I didn’t have to disassemble the coat; I just turned it inside out through the lining and worked on it. The fit and appearance is much better now.

Yesterday was my machine mastery class with five students. That class exhausts me. I never know who is going to show up, with what machine, or what they are going to want to learn. I have to be on my toes thinking of what to teach them next. We talked about presser feet for part of the class, because I am a bit of a presser foot junkie. Bernina has 107 different presser feet for its machines. I don’t have all of them, but I have quite a few. Yesterday, we all found out that we could use the #71 flat-fell foot for sewing on binding. My mind was blown. This video explains how:

I’m going to try this on the next set of potholders I make. I think it will neaten and simplify the binding process tremendously. I prefer to sew down my quilt bindings by hand, though.

[BTW, if you Bernina owners out there haven’t discovered the Bernina of Naperville channel, I highly recommend it. Gail does some top-notch videos on all things Bernina.]

We spent the afternoon session of class working on machine embroidery. That also exhausts me because there is still so much I don’t know, although the store owner is more than willing to come back to the classroom and help with tough questions. I am hoping to be able to devote some time over Christmas break to do some embroidery.

******

We have to talk about the weather. Western Washington is getting slammed with precipitation from repeated atmospheric rivers—which are supposed to continue though the end of the month—and is experiencing flood emergencies. Some of that moisture is making it inland to us, but it’s falling as rain instead of snow because the cold air is stuck in Canada. We are also under a flood watch here. (Our elevation is such that we aren’t in danger, but locations in the valley are.) I really think that if it were cold enough to snow, the amount of precipitation we’re getting would result in another winter like 1996-97, when we got so much snow that our dogs were walking on the roof of the garage.

It feels more like March than December right now, but the husband reminded me that we have plenty of opportunities for snow—and a lot of it—yet this winter.