Free Tutorials and the end of the Sewing Summits

Last week I finished up shooting and editing my twelfth Sewing Summit. I’ve been involved in these from the very beginning several years ago when Rebecca Page of Rebecca Page Patterns began them. I always loved the concept—a week of sewing tutorials, multiple classes a day, free the day of and paid if you wanted access to the videos afterwards. It was not without kinks, but they seemed to mostly smooth them out as time went on. Eventually they started paying teachers a small lump sum, which was nice. The main incentive and source of payment for the teachers was always through getting people to sign up for the paid option through our affiliate links. As I’ve always been lousy at drumming up sales, and many of my projects weren’t really of interest to my followers (who are mostly bag sewers), I think I got a total of two sales the whole time I did the Sewing Summits! For me, the joy was in the challenge of coming up with projects and videoing them. Plus I usually got a good amount of people signing up for my newsletter, so that was a benefit as well.

Here is the project I was working on, by the way:

Mitered corner placemats!

When I tried to submit the videos, I ran into some issues. So I emailed people. Nothing. Emailed again. Nothing. Tried the web contact form—not working. Realized that all those emails had been bouncing and going to my deleted folder. The group had changed ownership and names last year, but even the newer emails weren’t working. Asked in the Facebook group, got a moderator response with a valid email for the owner. The owner told me I should have been contacted to say the Summits were paused for now.

I’m very grateful another member of the group sent me a DM. Apparently the CEO left last month. The employees were told to stop working. I’m not sure who is keeping the company together at this point (it’s now called You.Make Patterns). When the scheduled Sewing Summit for this week didn’t start on Monday, the Facebook group started heating up. Other instructors said they also hadn’t heard anything. Within a day both the Summit group (You.Make.Learn) and the main You.Make group were paused. The website is full of ads. I don’t know if they refunded people who paid for the Summit that was supposed to start this Monday. If I were one of those people, I’d go through my payment company to get a refund.

It’s rather a sad ending for what seemed to be a successful business. I only owned one or two Rebecca Page patterns but they seemed like good patterns. The Sewing Summits were a lot of fun. I decided that there is no longer any reason to keep my video tutorials to myself! Most of my tutorials in the Free Tutorials section started out as Sewing Summit projects. I’ve been publishing the patterns but pointing people towards the Summits to actually watch the videos. Now, I’m posting all of those videos on Youtube. There are a couple that don’t have written patterns, and I’m going to remedy that. For now, I have eight new video tutorials between 30-70 minutes long, with a couple more coming. (My video storage ran out of space and is giving me fits with deleting old files, so that’s a bit of a problem).

As I don’t have Summits as a reason to make free tutorials now, and I’m looking for part-time jobs currently, I’m not sure if I’ll go ahead and keep making my own videos for the list of tutorial ideas I have. I also haven’t published a paid bag pattern in a year, and I really would like to get back to doing that again. So, I’m sad about the Summits being over, but hoping that with the videos on Youtube, they will get more traffic.