A Swing and a Miss and a New Tool

A lot was happening behind the scenes over the summer. One of those secret projects was my application to become a Bernina Ambassador. The open call went out in June. The submission deadline was the end of July. The submission had to include a proposal, photos of a sewing project, a sample tutorial, and an optional video. There were two categories: Social Media Influencer or Educator. Obviously, I chose Educator.

I wrote the proposal, leaning heavily on the fact that I own four Bernina machines and teach extensively. I had lots of photos of sewing projects, I have produced many tutorials in the form of class handouts and patterns. The weak link, for me, was the video. Even though the video was optional, I felt it was important to include one, so I spent most of my time working on that part of the submission. Video is the reason I don’t have a YouTube channel. I have the equipment. I know how to make and edit videos. I don’t enjoy doing it. I did it anyway, for this submission, and when it was done, I was very proud of how it turned out. I chose to video one of the techniques I teach in my serger cording foot class. Maybe I will post the video in a future blog post.

I submitted my entry a week before the deadline so it wouldn’t run up against bike tour. Candidates were supposed to be notified some time in early September. Early September came and went with no word from Bernina. I accepted the fact that I probably hadn’t made the cut, and earlier this week I got the e-mail confirming that fact.

I don’t often not succeed at what I attempt. (I will not use the word fail here, because failing implies I didn’t even try.) Bernina was looking for something—someone—specific and I didn’t meet their criteria. But that opened up space for me to go ahead with the sewing classes, and those have been a success by every metric I consider important. The possibility of a YouTube channel is still on the table, too, although if I really wanted to have a YouTube channel, there would be one already.

I think it’s important to talk about the efforts that don’t produce the desired results just as much as it’s important to talk about the ones that do. I could have chosen not to mention my Ambassador application and none of you would have been the wiser. However, this isn’t Instagram. You don’t get only the polished, perfect image. You get it all.

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It is a bit of a joke here at Chez Schuster-Szabo that the husband has never met a tool he didn’t like. I didn’t think there was a tool he didn’t own, but then I found one.

We have been sweeping out our respective garages using push brooms. For him, that’s not a big deal. His shop has a beautifully smooth concrete floor because it was poured by a professional (him). My garage has a very rough floor with no level spots and a lot of patching over cracks. It takes me a good hour and a lot of elbow grease to get the dirt out of the garage, and I have to sweep it periodically or the dirt ends up in the car and the house. Recently, an ad for a manual sweeper popped up on Facebook. I ordered one. It arrived Monday afternoon, so yesterday morning, I assembled it and went to work:

This thing is amazing. It took me fifteen minutes to sweep the floor. Everything goes into a hopper in the middle, which lifts out for emptying. I dumped at least a pound of dirt and rocks out in the driveway.

They make even fancier versions of these sweepers that are battery powered, but when your husband is a firefighter and you spend your evenings watching videos of fire departments battling structure fires caused by tool and car batteries that malfunction and end up in thermal runaway, you develop an aversion to things with batteries. 😳

I told the husband he could borrow my sweeper if he wants.