For the past five weeks, I’ve been taking a sewing class at Treadle Yard Goods in St. Paul. It has been so helpful and so much fun!

I’m so glad I found Treadle! After searching online, most places that I found were project-based classes. And the projects that were being made, were not very interesting to me. (I’ve made enough pajama bottoms, and I really don’t use a lot of tote bags.) I was thinking I would have to go back to school and take fashion classes. Which would be interesting, but I’m not going to be a fashion designer, and I really don’t want to write papers about fashion or study the concepts behind fashion as much as I think they would expect you to in a college class. I’m really only interested in creating clothes for me and my family and making patterns that I want clothes to be made out of. (Which I’m sure would be really boring and low-key for a class where you are expected to make clothes for a runway show!)

At Treadle, the classes are technique-based, and you pick the project. Our class was small, only five people, and we had an arrangement of clothes: shirts, skirts, different types of pajamas, and my project, a dress. There was some class instruction, and then we were turned loose on our projects, with assistance when needed. If the instructor was helping someone with something that she thought would be beneficial for the rest of the class to see, she would call us over and show us what she was teaching that person.

I was a little unsure if a beginner’s class would be right for me, since I have some previous sewing experience, but I’m so glad that I started at the beginner level. I even learned things when we went over how to thread a machine and make a bobbin! And this dress is the best constructed thing I have ever sewn! Unfortunately, it’s a little large for me, but I’ll just have to wait to learn how to fix that when I take one of their pattern alteration classes.