Unfortunately this was a disappointing workshop for me, and I didn’t learn much from it. There is some good info in it for anyone brand new to sewing, but if you already have some projects under your belt, you can just as easily read about fabrics online.
First of all, the information covered in the class was all very theoretical. I imagine for any novice sewists it’s useful to learn about how various fabrics and fibers are made, but without having samples so you can see and feel the qualities of different fabrics, it all stays pretty abstract. What we covered in our workshop could have just been an online course, or a 30-minute read. The only practical thing we did was the burn test, but the instructor, Ally, didn’t know beforehand what fabrics the burning samples were made of, so it still ended up being a bit of a guessing game. I did appreciate that she grabbed some extra samples from her fabric book so we could see and smell the burn test for wool and silks.
Secondly, the class didn’t cover everything that was mentioned in the description; we didn’t go into what fabrics to choose for what projects at all. I’m not sure why this wasn’t covered as Ally ran out of things to say with half an hour still left to go.
Lastly, Ally was super friendly and enthusiastic, but spent most of the workshop just reading from the handouts we were given, which wasn’t very engaging.
I think this workshop could really benefit from a revamp, and I think a great addition would be to have several large samples of various types of fabrics, so students can translate the theory into tactile and visual feedback. This would also feed into “what fabric to choose for various projects” part of the class really well.