The Sew Expo Adventure, Part 2

I know enough about these kinds of events not to schedule myself into four days of back-to-back classes. Thursday was my light day, which turned out to be a good thing given the stomach issue of the day before. (I hadn’t been able to take my thyroid meds Wednesday morning and by Thursday afternoon, when I finally remembered to take them, I was dragging a bit.)

On Thursday morning, Tera and I took “Put Your Best Foot Forward,” taught by Bernina Educator Sylvain Bergeron.

We got to sew on the Kaffe Fassett 770 edition machines:

Let me just say that if I had been in the market for a new sewing machine, I would have plunked down the cash for this one without hesitation. I am turning into quite the Bernina fangirl and this is one sweet machine. I don’t need Yet Another Sewing Machine—and there is nothing wrong with my Janome 6600P—so I enjoyed the experience of sewing on this one and moved on.

This was an excellent class. Sylvain is an engaging and entertaining teacher. We tried out almost a dozen different presser feet. Bernina has a dizzying array of presser feet for all their machines and this class helped to demystify the differences. And we laughed a lot.

Tera had a class at 2 pm and my second one wasn’t until 3:30 pm, so we grabbed a quick lunch and went shopping. I found it interesting that although there were not very many quilting classes on the roster, quilting suppliers made up the bulk of the vendors. Every longarm machine company had a booth and just about every quilt store in the PNW was there.

We were mostly interested in garment fabrics, not quilting fabrics. Tera found an armful of knits at Billie’s Designer Fabrics. I was on the hunt for some raincoat fabric. Billie’s had a gorgeous navy blue cotton poplin with a nylon backing—Ryan Roberts deadstock—that would have been perfect, but there were only three yards left on the bolt and I need six. And it’s deadstock, so she can’t reorder. Splash Fabrics, from Seattle, also had a booth. Splash makes a laminated cotton, but it’s not quite what I am looking for in a raincoat fabric. I’ve made aprons from it.

The other garment fabric vendor was Amanda’s Bundles, from southern California. This is where I did most of my damage. The booth consisted of Rubbermaid totes full of two-yard packages of fabrics, mostly knits. I bought some beautiful seafoam green rayon ponte as well as this chicken-themed ITY knit:

ITY stands for Interlock Twist Yarn. ITY knits are very interesting. This one doesn’t have a lot of stretch, but it’s drapey and polished. I’ve never sewn with an ITY knit before and I’m eager to see how it sews up. I think it will work best as a simple knit tunic.

I also bought this double-brushed poly just because I loved the print. I may end up looking like my grandmother’s dinnerware, but I’ll have fun in the process:

As we were walking through one of the vendor buildings, I spotted Jen Stern sitting in her booth. I follow her YouTube channel—J Stern Designs—so we popped over to say hello. She had a pair of linen pants hanging in her booth that were from her latest set of videos. Jen designed the Sorcha Pants pattern to illustrate the top-down, center-out method of pants fitting. This method was first introduced by a woman named Ruth Collins in Threads magazine last year. Jen produced both the pattern and a waistband kit, which uses hook-and-loop tape for making the muslin of your pants. Tera and I each bought a set. This is probably going to be a project for next fall. The method makes a lot of sense to me. You start with the waistband placed on your body where you want it—no low-rise pants for me!—and fit the crotch and legs from there instead of making the pants and trying to figure out what you have to alter. I can follow along on Jen’s videos and she also offers Zoom fitting consultations.

My Thursday afternoon session was more of a lecture than a class, given by another Bernina educator. She used a Power Point presentation and passed around samples of decorative serger stitches using fancy threads. I came away with tons of ideas to develop into classes to teach here.

For dinner, I suggested we go to Mama Stortini’s, another local favorite from DD#1’s college days. We had her graduation dinner there. Tera ordered pasta and I ordered a cauliflower-crust mushroom and cheese pizza, but it took forever for our food to arrive. Apparently, they had burned my pizza and had to make me another one. The waitress offered us a free dessert, so we split the spiced pear in a snickerdoodle crust with vanilla ice cream. It was yummy. I joked that at the rate we were going, much of the food on our trip was going to be free.

Friday’s classes were my most disappointing ones of the week. More about them tomorrow.