Being petty...

Okay, I might have broken away from my love affair with Alabama Chanin.  Primarily since I've been following their blog in hopes of getting inspiring, and have instead been getting swamped with the mostly uninspiring and unflattering new items.  Clearly, my interest is not one that they need to pique- I'm not in the target demographic for their clothes AT ALL, financially.  But I found myself getting really annoyed this week when they posted a tutorial for couching.  It amounts to  - "put down cord on fabric, stitch around it, stitch the ends together".  I was trying to figure out what bothered me so much about this post, and I think I've got a handle on it now.  Couching is REALLY simple in it's basic operation and form.  And, yet, there are a lot of things that will make your work look much better, like choice of fabric/cord, width of cord, spacing of stitches, how you finish the ends.  I experimented with ALL those options when I was making my coat.  The AC blog post simultaneously raised the simple part (stitch around cord) to a level of detail that somehow makes it seem way harder than it is, and left out any information about the things someone would actually wonder about if they were trying this on their own.

It's silly to be annoyed - it is totally against their interest to teach people how to do all of this when they are (hopefully) making a lot of money out of the courses they teach, which are the one part of their whole package that I would actually really aspire to do some day.  But - if I were going to do a blog post of that sort for an audience like they have, I would stitch up a couple samples with variations on cord thickness, with curves and an overlapped end, and would photograph those to give people an idea of HOW MUCH some of these things could matter. 

Edited to add: Oh, and this is all on top of my annoyance at their stencil designs.  "Magdalena", which they charge for, is totally a stock image - I saw it on some kleenex-brand tissue boxes at my mom's house this summer.  And I'm really not excited about their newer stencil offering this summer.  Again - totally looking gift horses in the mouth, but I was surprised at how much I found myself repelled by the new stencil.