In February, Atlantic Sewing Guild members were thrilled to hear from and be able to interact with our guest speaker, Deepika Prakash, founder of Sewing Pattern Review found at Patternreview.com!

Deepika started Sewing Pattern Review 20 years ago. Within a few years, the website grew into a full time position for her, an administrative person, and dozens of volunteers. Currently there are 500k members, reviewing 150k projects, 767 pattern companies, and 6500 different sewing machines! Through the years her mantra has remained ‘Share your successes’. She maintains the Sewing Pattern Review to encourage people to sew, to inspire people to show their alterations, and to share with the community. Membership is free and is a great research tool for patterns, companies and sewing machines. Members demonstrate amazing imagination and innovations through their sewing challenges.

Deepika then demonstrated how to do a pattern review. The process includes good pictures in daylight and an interactive step by step procedure on the website. Deepika’s enthusiasm and sense of community was inspiring.

As a surprise, members were thrilled to hear about Deepika’s Canadian and Nova Scotian connections! Deepika shared with members her multiple connections to Canada, from Jalie patterns that is one of her favourite Indie pattern companies, to her visit to Nova Scotia in 2017.  She was even wearing Grainline Studio’s Alder dress made from fabric of the provincial flowers of Canada, and she knew our founding member, Julie Culshaw!

Thank you for visiting and speaking with us, Deepika!

Sew & Tell

In the last half of the meeting, we went through our usual Sew & Tell to show garments recently made by members. Some of them are below from Lorna, Nancy, and Reina. Click on them to see them enlarged.

Partners Challenge

We also got the first completed projects come in for our Partners Challenge, but we’ll save them for a dedicated blog entry after more come in!

Special Guest Speaker Announcement

Our Vice-President, PatM, then surprised members with a special guest speaker announcement for the evening of Feb 23rd at 7 pm, Susan Khalje! Susan has offered to talk to us about underlining and also sewing with linen. We will ask members for donations to attend the talk, with donations going to local organizations promoting sewing.  We can’t wait!!!