 chat videos so much where I can just kind of catch you up on what's going on on the channel in my personal life a little bit and we can just have a little bit more of like a relaxed conversation. I know this one's going up a little bit late but I just feel like I've had so many like set in stone things that I needed to get on the channel on a certain day and nothing allowed for the chat video to go live until now. So here we are but I have some notes here. So let's chat first about like channel updates and things going on there. I want to remind everyone that I am doing weekly Zoom calls with some of the Hemsiders. You guys it is so much fun every single Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. We have this Zoom call where threads and scissor level Hemsiders can join and bring me all of their sewing questions, anything that they need to know about fit, anything they want to know about fabric, like is this fabric good for this pattern? What would you recommend for this or that? And so we just answer the questions, chat. Sometimes the conversation goes way off topic. I love talking about other things but it really is such a good time. So if you're wanting some more like one-on-one or at least small group type setting to get some of your sewing questions answered, highly recommend you becoming an Hemsider and joining us for those Zoom calls. I have also picked the pattern for the second quarter sew along. It's going to go live in May and we're going to be making a butteric little shirt dress. Super cute. So if you want additional help with that, the Hemsiders Weekly Zoom is also a great, great place to do that. I still have all of those digital downloads on the website, the Fast Fit Workbook. You guys a ton of you downloaded that. It was free for the month of March and I am so, so happy to see that so many of you were able to get your hands on it and I hope that you're using it. I would love, love, love to know if you're using it, how it helped and if you guys can give me any feedback on it at all, that would be great. I'm also selling like a consultation type of thing that goes along with the Fast Fit Workbook. If your questions are specifically about fit, I did one a couple of days ago helping someone fit kind of like a blousy type of Big Four pattern. I can't remember, but we go through the Fast Fit Workbook together kind of explaining not only like how to get through the steps of the workbook, but also like my thinking and how I arrive to making certain fit decisions, certain pattern alterations. What I look for and what I see, you know, like how I'm able to figure out, oh, maybe this needs a tweak or maybe that needs a tweak and then you go off on your own, make your muslin and hopefully have a, you know, much better fitting garment. So if you want some one-on-one help with fit, that is the way to go, also on the website. All right, so what I bought, you guys saw a lot of what I've been buying because I've been doing these hauls. Joanne has had so many of these pattern sales, so I've come back and done like a little pattern and fabric haul. I've got another one coming up here shortly when I went shopping for the 99 cent quick sew and simplicity maybe. Yeah, I got some patterns and fabric during that sale period, so I have not yet another haul video coming. I'm telling you, if they keep those sales going, I'm going to have to seriously reevaluate my pattern stash. Other than that, I ended up buying some patterns for the Stylemaker Fabrics Spring Style Tour. I got the Fulton Sweater Blazer, I got the Rad Patterns Seaside Coolots, which I am obsessed with. I already made my second pair. I can't tell you guys how much I love it. I have a third pair ready to go to be cut out. It comes together so quick. They're super cute, super flattering, so easy to wear. I just cannot tell you enough about that pattern. I love it so, so, so much. I didn't get, I don't think I got anything else. The only fabric I got was from the Joanne haul that you saw and then the one coming up and then those couple of patterns. That was really all I bought. I started that series about, as seen on Instagram, and we did the first one with that bias binder point that was a total fail. I ended up getting another product in to test for that. I'm excited about it. I am always excited about it, though, till I use them. I'm going to do those once a month, so try and space them out a little bit. I think the one for April is a little vacuum that I got to vacuum out all of the debris in the sewing machines, so I'll show you kind of how that works next week, maybe the week after that. Oh, which reminds me. My It's So Easy TV presentations are going to be on TV. It's finally here. I am season 21, episode 3 and episode 6. They air here on PBS at like 3.30 on Friday afternoons, and then they re-air them Saturday mornings at 8am, so you'll have to check your local listings. But season 21, episode 3 and episode 6 are going to be my It's So Easy, my TV debut. So that'll be fun. Okay, I know that's not what I bought, but that should have gone earlier. All right, rapid fire, what I'm watching. Okay, so I binge watched Girls, HBO's show Girls with Lena Dunham, and oh, I can't remember that girl that was in the flight attendant. I can't remember her real name. A bunch of really great people were in an Adam Driver, and I just, I really enjoyed it. The episodes are like 30 minutes long, so you know, burn through them really, really quickly. I think that if I had seen that show when I was in my mid-20s, in my early to mid-20s, it would have helped me. It would have helped me a lot, kind of navigate all of the like crazy feelings I was having. As a someone in their late 30s, you know, I was kind of looking back on it like I could relate back then. Not super relatable now, but I thought the music of the show was really great. I thought the acting was really wonderful. And I think that the topics and like the way that they addressed like misogyny, you know, body issues, you know, a lot of this kind of stuff, new jobs, relationships, healthy relationships, I think all that kind of stuff was still very relevant. And so I really, really enjoyed that. So I'm back on the struggle bus trying to find something else to watch. So in the meantime, I have been loving this podcast. It is called Ringer Dish. And Ringer Dish is like E Network. It's like a network. And then within it, they have all these different series. So this particular series, and hear me out here, this particular series goes through each episode, goes through each of Taylor Swift's albums. I know that not everybody is a Taylor Swift fan. That's fine. This particular podcast doesn't, I mean, yes, it's about Taylor. Yes, it's about her personal life. Yes, it's about, you know, a little bit about who the songs are about and stuff. But it is also very much a lot about what was going on in society then, and how that might have impacted her music, what she was going through, not necessarily personally in relationships, but what she was going through as a musician and as a business person and as a brand, and how that might have influenced her music. It talks a lot about the music industry. It talks a lot about, you know, touring and, you know, going to the radio stations and just everything that goes into creating like a mega superstar like Taylor Swift, you know, obviously they talk about their favorite songs and what worked on the albums and what didn't work on the albums, but it was really, truly fascinating to take a look at somebody's body of work, one album at a time, and kind of understand, especially retrospectively, you know, looking back on a lot of them. Some of them are like 13 years old, so looking back on them and just understanding where she was and what she was going through and everything else outside of personal relationships was really fascinating. The hosts are, one is like an entertainment reporter and another one is like, he was the former CEO of Ticketmaster. He also worked for Twitter, so he understands the music industry in a very specific way. He also is a musician and so hears things in her songs that I would never have heard. Here's how they sound like other songs. Here's how the song was like mastered, not mastered, but produced. Very, very interesting. On Ring Your Dish, if you're a Taylor Swift fan or not, I highly recommend going to give them a listen. It was really, really good. I also finished the wedding date, which is in a series and the Jasmine Guillory, I think is how you say her name, wrote the wedding date and I found out that she had written the first half of the wedding date as part of a college project. It was like an assignment. I don't remember where she went to school, but she had written the first half of it then, graduated, finished the book and actually got it published and then was able to create all of these sequels. So I finished that and I was like, okay, it was okay. It was pretty, I don't know if in some genres of fiction now, if like the sex stuff is like, I mean, after Fifty Shades of Grey and that took off and that was so big, did that become like necessary to be like every 30 minutes? There was some major, major sex scene going into like super, super detailed and I'm like, I don't really get how this is adding to the story. I don't feel like it's adding to the characters. It just feels like a gimmick at this point. So that was a bit discouraging. I didn't really like that part. I obviously couldn't listen to it in the car because every time I go to a stoplight and there's like moaning and groaning, people would be like, what in the world is she listening to? But I did download the next in the series, which is called The Proposal and I was really interested, or it was really interesting to see that the proposal has different main characters than the wedding date. I just assumed the wedding date people were going to get engaged and that's what we were talking about with the proposal, but no, they're related in a way, but not the same people. So I was like, well, that's a cool take because then you get all new characters and you get to know people, but yet there is this tie and you're like kind of familiar with the with the one of the main characters because he played a supporting role in the first book, you know what I mean? So it kind of develops that way, which I thought was a cool idea. Also, probably half the sex scenes in this one than the first one. Maybe she just got out of her system. I don't even know, but there was like a time. My latest obsession, well, I guess it's probably the Taylor Swift stuff. I mean, she's coming out with her rerelease, her first rerelease. I've been listening to her music nonstop, listening to those podcasts and just in full Swifty mode. It's in full Swifty mode. I have loved her for so long. If you guys don't know, I've been a Swifty, gosh, since since Speak Now, maybe a little bit before that. So since her third album, maybe the tail end of her second album. And it's just so exciting to see what she's doing with that album and releasing songs from the vault is so fun because she's evolved so much as a woman and as a musician. So it's fun to hear, you know, what your 17 year old selves, at least like going back and reading diary, you know what I mean? And being like, Oh God, I was so dramatic about that. But people can relate to it now. It's definitely very much something that I think girls go through the feelings that she expresses in these vault songs. So I mean, I can go on and on. I'm going to have a Taylor Swift YouTube channel, honestly, but I know I got time for that. Okay, so Oh, I also wanted to remind you guys, I don't have it here with me, but I am still working on my cross stitch slowly, but surely we're making progress there. Still having a lot of fun with that. So I'm not necessarily obsessed with it still, but I'm definitely still working on it too. So a little update there. And then what I'm trying. So I think what I'm trying now more than before is, and I touched on this a little bit in my makes video is I'm really challenging myself to try new techniques, whether that be a new thing on my serger or a new thing on my sewing machine, whether it's figuring out some kind of special thing that either one of those machines can do. Or if it's trying different silhouettes, you know, the silhouette for the Stalmaker spring tour outfit with the crop top over the Kulots, isn't necessarily something I would have picked up even a couple of years ago. I would have been like, I don't really know about that. But you know, I enjoyed kind of thinking outside the box a little bit with that outfit. And of course I love the result. I mean, that outfit is hands down one of my favorites that I've ever, ever, ever made like as an outfit. So I think just like, I don't know if it's like a result of like coming, coming out of the pandemic slowly, but surely, but coming out of the pandemic, things kind of starting to go back to normal, plus the idea of spring and everything kind of renewing and being bright and fresh again. Maybe that is kind of like opening up my creativity a little bit more. And I'm not letting my abilities control whether I should try something or not. I'm just trying, accepting the fact that I may fail, accepting the fact that I may look terrible, trying new things and just seeing what sticks. And thankfully so far, I haven't had too many things not work out, knock on wood. I had a very successful march in the sewing room, especially considering how many things I was experimenting with. So I'm pretty happy about that. All right, what to expect in April. So I touched on this before, well, it doesn't really apply to April. That's more May, but I will be working on the, the sew along, you will have a video in April that will talk to you about the pattern fabric choices and all that kind of stuff that like I call it like episode zero of the sew along, because it's not really sewing, but it is important to know what else. No classes in April. I do have another skill pop class on the schedule for May. So if you have anybody out there that wants to learn how to use a sewing machine, if you want to have a new sewing buddy, send them to skill pop. And that is where they can sign up and learn everything about like how to plug it in, how to wind the bobbin, how to change the needle, what are presser feet, of course, how to thread it, and then we'll even practice some sewing as well. We did this earlier in March and it was just so fun to see everybody so focused. And you know, for us, like using a sewing machine now is just like mindless. I don't even think about it, but to have to like break down the steps and seeing people like, you know, really, really focused in on what you're doing and kind of nervous to like, I don't want to break it. You know what I mean? It was really cute to kind of go back to whenever I was going through those feelings. That was a lot of fun also. So because I don't have like a ton of like work obligations, I guess we can call it that. Hopefully I'm going to get a lot of really great fun sewing done. So I'm super excited about that. And with that, that takes us through our little checklist of the Let's Chat video. I would love, I love it whenever you guys do the quick fire questions, what you are watching, what you're reading, your latest obsession and anything new that you're trying. If you want to leave those in the comment section below, I truly, truly love reading all of those. So that is going to do it for me today, y'all. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you very soon. Bye.