I feel a bit off kilter this month.

I decided to jump in and say yes to the dress. No, I am already married.

Let’s start again. I decided to say yes to teaching a class at a local sewing shop in the month of January . I will be teaching a improv piecing class called Out of the Box Improv and really look forward to getting others excited about improvisational cutting and design of modern quilts. For a long time, I have felt a little nudge to teach and really have missed the teaching portion of my previous physical therapy career. So in I jumped with 2 feet with no thought to the fact that it’s December and all the craziness that December brings with it.

I always underestimate the amount of work that teaching comes with but want to start strong with class samples and lessons. And I want to make the class my own and not rely on others information so I have been working carefully on the assignments.

I pieced the class sample last week and just the piecing took me about 40 hours. Now next up is the machine quilting. Here’s a peek of a section of it.

Section of class sampler for Out of the Box Improv class

I used a Denyse Schmidt packet of” Hadley” fabric. I haven’t used commercial fabrics in eons and chose a vintage look. It was really hard for me not to use solids But I want them to be able to work with commercial prints and solids -so I had to do the same. 🙂

     Happy Thursday January 17th ! I had to laugh when I looked at the date today. There is a lot of 17 going around here.

     Last week I helped to teach a beginning sewing class at the kids high school. It is a busy and crazy  afternoon time with 17 sewing machines, 17 high school students and 4 adults. Only a few of the kids had sewn before and no one had used the machines in front of them. Some of the machines had “issues” and all threaded differently so our first challenge was getting machines operational. The kids were patient but very excited to dig right in.

     They made a small duffle bag cutting out a pattern and really did a great job even sticking with the grommetts that were needed at the end for the closure of the bag. We finished early and had time to make a few small donation quilts. I even showed them how to sew on a button so they could do it when they go away to college.

    I didn’t know what to expect when I offered to help.  My biggest worry was they would be bored. But it exceeded all my expectations as the kids were so excited to learn to sew. They loved it and asked if we would come back again next year. 17 kids and 17 sewing machines = great fun.

    The number 17 also made me laugh as I have 17 unfinished pieces from the last few years that I have deemed worthy of finishing. True confessions time. It may be the year of finishing things.