Just when you thought you have heard everything and a shout out to Stylearc

So much to talk about.

Christmas was one of those really good ones. I spent a lot of it walking around with things I wanted to post but time with my head out of the dishwasher was at a premium.

Enough flypaper thoughts to wallpaper a house. Enough sewing ideas to fill every room.

For some reason the holiday season always leaves me, after a long period of doing for family, with a burning desire to do some serious sewing for myself.

I started that today by downloading and sticking together a Stylearc pattern. They now have a bunch of their patterns on Etsy - such a good, good idea. Thank you Stylearc. Three sizes in one download, which is handy for those of who are weighing in at some lifetime upper end achievement numbers on the scale, and high instant gratification, with no postage fees for those of us who want to sew now.

I personally do not usually like sticking letter size pieces of paper to the dining room table with scotch tape for three hours before I can actually start making something. However I have to say that Stylearc's downloadables are in a totally different class to anything I have pieced together before. Clear with nice margins so you can cut around each .pdf so you aren't just hoping that the cut edges of the paper are lining up right. Feels very accurate and clean.

Me and Mr.Paypal will be visiting Etsy often over the winter I can see that.

Now back to the title of this post.

For various reasons, partially kicked off by my return to teaching sewing, I have been asked to look at a lot of sewing problems lately and asked for my two cents.

When you have made as many mistakes as I have in my sewing career a person gets pretty well qualified to identify what went wrong. She also comes up with a few ideas of how to make it go right next time.

Over the holidays it seemed to me that it might be interesting to share some of that here.

Which explains the new sidebar you see on the right.

Of course this advice will be coming from me, so you might want to consider that before you ask my opinion.

There is a possibility that I may tell you to just throw it out of a second storey window and drive over it with the car and go back to the fabric store - which is something I actually did once, but still don't want to talk about.

So keep things in perspective on this little project.

Now off I go with nothing to do but eat, sew and write things on my blog for the next few days.