From Theory to Practice

The student in my serger mastery class yesterday was one of the regulars at the store. She has taken several classes from me before but doesn’t use her serger enough to be comfortable with it. I hear that from many people. Unless you’re using your serger a couple of times a week, it’s easy to forget things from class to class.

Because it was just the two of us, she asked if I could walk her through a project that would help her to know what features of the serger she needed to use and when. She mentioned that she is planning to make a dress for her granddaughter that can be used as a costume. (Granddaughter is in musical theater.) We didn’t have to start from ground zero because she knows basic dressmaking. I thought for a bit and came up with an idea.

As it happened, I had stopped at the blueprint shop on my way to class to get a large-format printout of The Avid Seamstress Raglan Dress pattern. I suggested that we make a muslin of the pattern—which I needed to do anyway to check the sizing—and that would give us the opportunity to try a few different serger techniques on the seams. I bought three yards of muslin and quickly traced off the pattern and cut it out. We spent the rest of the class making the muslin. The store keeps a sewing machine in the classroom so we were able to use that for some of the assembly.

[I have some thoughts about that pattern, but I’ll save them for tomorrow’s post.]

Her request was a good one. Until she asked, I had forgotten that I wondered the same thing when I got my first serger. What serger stitches are appropriate in what situations? In my mastery class last week in Missoula, one of the students mentioned that she thought that stitch #2—which on the Bernina L860 is the super stretch stitch—was meant to be used on knits. It’s actually meant for elastic insertions, but unless she went digging for that information, how was she to know? That machine has something like 16 regular serger stitch options.

Maybe this needs to be a class or a podcast episode.

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I ran errands after class. I can tell it is summer in the Flathead. Running errands now takes me three times as long as it does during the winter. I decided to postpone my trips to Costco and Walmart for another day. I stopped at Lowes, though, to get a sprayer to spray my weed killer in the herb garden and ended up buying a birdbath, too. I liked this one because it is some kind of rubberized plastic and while it’s not light, it isn’t so heavy that I can’t move it around:

I put a solar bubbler in it. And you can see why I need the weed killer. I need to mix that up soon and get on it, although I might pull some of the larger weeds, first.

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I continue to be surprised by the weather. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of thunder and the patter of rain on the roof. I hadn’t seen storms in the forecast. My phone was in the bedroom instead of downstairs, where I usually leave it overnight, and the NBC Montana weather app kept helpfully announcing, “Lightning has been detected near your location” every few minutes. That’s the same NBC Montana weather app that has completely botched the forecasts this week.

We need the rain. The long-range forecasts are not looking good. And I am very, very tempted to get a Tempest weather station and have the husband mount it on the roof of the old garage. The Tempest weather information can be fed to the National Weather Service and it’s obvious that they need my help. 🧐