Today was challenging. I have one of those headaches I get when I’ve been concentrating too hard for too long – or more specifically, when I’ve been trouble-shooting with chiffon and stitch-length.

We started off nice and slow: play around on the machine, try different stitches, get a feel for it, sew a seam, press it. Then somehow a gentle trickle of seam finishes and techniques became a flood. Individually they are all fine, and relatively easy if you’re paying attention: welt seam, French seam, channel seam, joining bias, stretch stitches, darts, grading, clipping, notching… but somewhere around mid-afternoon they all started to muddle together. Wait, what now? We sew that to that, and it looks like that? Sure, ok, I’ll do that, but I don’t know why I’m doing it or when I would ever use it. Oh wait, my bobbin’s run out, so I need to spend 30 seconds winding a new one and somehow in that 30 seconds I have fallen behind on completing the last sample while everyone else has moved on to I-don’t-know-what. Oh, no, it’s fine, they’re making piping. I’ve done that before. I can make piping. Good!

Despite today’s challenges, I felt really comfortable on my assigned Bernina. In fact, we got on like a house on fire! So even though the chiffon was fiddly and the day was long, I’ve come out of it all that much more confident in my abilities.

And that’s the first week! I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I’m getting the sense that I – wait for it – know what I’m doing! All those times I thought I was just blindly following Paul’s instructions, second-guessing everything, absorbing nothing; well, I was wrong. It stuck.