Mastering the Mastery Class

Yesterday’s class was challenging, but in a good way. I had five students, all with different machines. We had everything from a Bernette—which is Bernina’s entry-level line—all the way up to a 790 PRO, which is not quite the top-of-the-line but close. (The 990 is the top-of-the-line machine.)

One student asked about updating the firmware on her machine—Bernina released a computer upgrade in July for many of the models—so I began class by helping those students who needed upgrades to perform them on their machines. I did the upgrade on my 880 last week. I downloaded the upgrades onto my laptop, copied them onto flash drives (helpfully provided for each student by the store), and showed them how to do the updates. After that, we moved on to oiling and machine maintenance.

The trickiest part for me, as the teacher, was balancing how to demonstrate the features of the higher-end machines without leaving the students with machines that didn’t have those features in the dust. Everyone was engaged and considerate, though, and we got through most of what I wanted to cover. Thankfully, the machine interfaces are all very similar.

Bernina puts a different foot or accessory on sale every month. Sometimes it’s a serger accessory, sometimes it’s a sewing machine accessory, and sometimes it’s an embroidery accessory. August’s sale items are the hemmer feet, so we played around with one of those.

I’ve used hemmer feet on other machines. It’s a bit tricky to get the hem started, but once it’s dialed in, the hemming is beautiful.

After yesterday, I’m going to start calling this class “Boot Camp” in my head. You may not know anything about your machine when you come in, but by the time you leave, you will have tried out every single feature on your machine whether you wanted to or not. 😂

I was mentally exhausted by the time I got home. I don’t think it will be like that every time; I remember feeling this way when I first began teaching the serger mastery classes and now I could do them in my sleep. There is just a tremendous amount to know about these machines.

Ashlee resurfaced yesterday; she got married a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t see her since we got back from BU. She stopped in to the classroom at the beginning of class and we chatted about adding another learn to sew class to the calendar.

Speaking of BU, episode 117 of the Bernina Sew and So podcast is a recap of this year’s Bernina University. I had such fun listening to it—it almost felt like being there all over again. And if you’re watching Project Runway, keep an eye out for some Bernina machines.

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I am home all day today. It is cool and overcast right now. I may work out in the garden or I may sew. I haven’t decided yet. It feels weird to be having to cut the grass all the way into August but it’s a relief not to have 90-degree weather. I started cleaning the basement but that’s going to be a longer-term project and it’s going to require some muscle from the husband.