The Sew Expo Adventure, Part 4

We ended our week at Sew Expo on a high note, with an excellent Saturday morning class on sewing machine needles. The teacher was a Schmetz educator and knew her stuff. (Schmetz needles are the ones I use.) Each student received a goodie bag:

This was better than Christmas. We got thread:

Fabric swatches:

A luggage tag with the fabulous Schmetz color-coding system on it:

And about 10 packs of needles, some of which we used in class. That classroom had Viking sewing machines.

The class was laid out in such a way that we were able to sew with different types of needles on many different kinds of fabrics. By the end of class—which went by too quickly!—we all had a good understanding of what needles were best for what applications. Even more importantly, we understood when it was possible, or even desirable, to bend the rules a bit.

After class, Tera and I loaded our stuff into the car and hit the road back to Spokane. We could have stayed through Saturday and driven back Sunday, but at the end of a busy week like that, I knew it would be better if we broke up the drive. I also had plenty of hotel points to use up. We checked in to the hotel when we got to Spokane, did a bit of shopping, and finished off with a dinner at Luna, one of our favorite Spokane restaurants.

We’ve already decided to go back again next year. We will have a better idea what to expect, having experienced it once. I’ll pay closer attention to teacher names, definitely, and try to choose classes on other brands of machines.

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I had eight women in my Coverstitch Basics class last night. Four were on Bernina L890s, two were on Bernette Funlocks, one was on a Bernina MDC, and one was on a Janome 2000cpx. I took my Janome 1000cpx—my first coverstitch machine—to use for demos. That’s the machine that had so many quality control issues. I had to take it apart and put it back together to get it to work properly. I keep it to use in classes.

I took lots of fabric scraps with me and by the end of class, each student was making beautiful coverstitch hems on a variety of fabrics, from thin rayon knits all the way up to ponte.

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The husband is going to set the brooder box up for me this weekend. I will make at least a couple of attempts to get chicks from the farm store next week, but if I am unsuccessful, then I will probably go ahead and just incubate eggs.

The little deer had a growth spurt while I was gone and is not quite so little anymore. Of course, a steady diet of sweet feed over the winter probably didn’t hurt.