Ashwini knew the basics of sewing from her first class but didn’t understand the details. She knew how a seam went together and all of the basic things, but was ready to build on her base knowledge.

She is both a Life Coach and Actuary; so fundamentals, comprehensive understanding, and problem-solving are part of her core personality make-up. She needed to be able to work on her own using techniques that she could understand and apply on the fly as she deconstructed a sari, threw together a sweatshirt, or bound buttonholes by hand.

We hit on a plan together for her second session: Why don’t we make a stitchbook? She knew that she wanted a comprehensive set of skills and techniques that she could apply as she improvised this or that but she needed details.
So we created a stitchbook that dealt with all of the stitches her machine did, what they do, and how to use them. We used heavy canvas as the leaves, and then added in fabrics and techniques that she may need for her as-yet-unknown sewing projects. After we worked through all of her machine’s stitches, we added pages with all of the various hand stitches she may come across.

All of this with notes and commentary that would make any scholar proud.

You can read Ash’s Yelp review here.

Ashwini Vaidya’s blog.