Planning My Summer Classes

I’ve been prepping class samples for the past couple of days. It’s time to start scheduling classes for the summer and early fall and I need to make supply lists for the stores. I was planning to teach in Spokane at the end of the month, but the store is having trouble getting copies of the Lark Tee pattern, so we’ve pushed that out a few months. Although most of the supply chain issues have improved, odd shortages are still happening here and there.

I made up a new sample for my flatlock pillow class:

I am supposed to teach project this at the quilt store north of town on Tuesday, but classes aren’t filling there. It is possible that I may have saturated that market. The two stores in town are very different—different machines, different fabric lines, different student interests. Some customers will only patronize one store or the other. Some shop at both. I try not to teach the same topics/projects at both stores. The flatlock pillow pattern is from the BabyLock website, so I am teaching it at the store that sells BabyLock machines.

The design and sales strategies adopted by various companies fascinate me. BabyLock pioneered air threading on sergers, which was a game changer. However, they went on to make their machines so idiot-proof that it’s almost impossible to override any settings. I liken it to driving an automatic versus a manual transmission. Given the choice, I would much rather be able to control the machine than to have the machine make decisions for me, but some people like being able to sew without having to tweak a bunch of settings.

The other pattern I made up this week is from the Bernina dealer website. I can’t show it to you yet, but it’s very cute. I was able to use some of the Bernina sewing-themed ribbon that Cathy gifted me. Bernina has specific requirements of its dealers that include offering a certain number of classes every year. Their dealer website, though, has robust support for making that happen, including classes with lesson plans already prepared. That’s less prep work I have do.

I also worked a bit on the Ravenwood Messenger bag. I really love these projects that are broken down into manageable steps. I feel like I’ve accomplished something if I finish one page of instructions. I made the back panel of the bag yesterday:

Those two zippers underneath the flap slide down to reveal an internal zippered mesh pocket. I didn’t do the mesh pocket on the first version because mesh can be kind of fiddly. This time, though, I included it.

The next step will be to add the zippered gusset (so many zippers), and then this will start to look like an actual bag.

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I created a website for our homestead foundation last year. One of the features I’m trying to add now is accepting credit cards through Stripe. The president (Susan) and treasurer (Sandy) of the organization came to my house for a few hours on Wednesday so we could take care of some of these administrative and financial issues. Stripe required us to upload a copy of the IRS letter identifying us as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Unfortunately, Stripe keeps sending me notices that the document is not an official IRS document. It appears to me that they are using optical character recognition software, and our document is so old that it doesn’t have the keywords the OCR software wanted to see.

I called customer support yesterday morning and had a surprisingly pleasant experience. The rep spoke understandable English, which I appreciated. As soon as I explained what was happening, she said she would kick the case up a level and have the document reviewed manually. We have lots of exciting events coming up this spring and summer and being able to take online registrations and payments is huge for us.

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I ordered some raincoat fabric swatches from Seattle Fabrics. They arrived this week. Unfortunately, the fabric I loved the most is $37 a yard and I need six yards. That puts this project firmly in the “You could buy a ready-made raincoat for that price” category. I am aware that people sew clothing for reasons other than to save money. In fact, that reason is probably close to the bottom of the list given the ready availability of fast fashion. Still, I have to sit with that idea for a bit. This particular fabric comes in a dozen colors, so I could make something really fun.