Joyce Simons Murphy tells us about her latest adventure – building a school!
What is SCCandA? SCCandA is a virtual school (offering online classes only) that will eventually have a complete curriculum for tailoring stylists (dressmakers and tailors who co-design with their clients) to take courses in all aspects of tailoring, altering, designing, and running a business. To view the school, go to www.sccanda.com and enroll in the two sample courses for free!
One course is on using the JSM pricing system Joyce calls SNAP Tools 2015. The other course is from guest instructor Brenda Breitenmoser on covering a hair comb to attach a bridal veil. Both courses use still images and narration to present the materials in a pre-recorded video clip format Joyce calls a "smarticle". The smarticle is the main content piece of each lesson within the course. Other content options including worksheets and printable pdf files will be added to some courses along with a discussion group and homework review options. The video clips are prerecorded and fully-captioned so they can be reviewed and studied at any time.
Addressing a need. Joyce saw the need for better schooling for tailoring stylists soon after graduating from what is now the School of Apparel Design and Development in Seattle in 1983. She was fortunate to have this schooling available to her for skills such as tailoring, dressmaking, design, and alterations. She was in the right place at the right time. Shortly thereafter the program gradually changed from a custom program to train tailors and dressmakers to a program with more emphasis on training designers to work in the ready-to-wear industry.
Joyce says, “Before attending school, I thought I had learned it all from my mother who made most of my clothes (until I took over) and my aunt, the home economics teacher at the local high school. The program proved me wrong. I had much to learn about menswear alterations and pattern making; information not available to me outside of class. I found there were time-honored procedures that were taught in class but not written in books – for example, techniques that tailors traditionally passed on from father to son.” These techniques will become part of the curriculum at SCCandA.
Meeting this need with education to call our own. There are many wonderful classes and workshops in tailoring, dressmaking and design providing great educational opportunities. However, they are generally geared to the sewing community at large and most do not address the business needs of the professional, nor do they include practice on numerous body shapes or the gamut of personal style considerations that tailoring stylists are expected to know. This is the niche Joyce is planning to fill by building SCCandA. ASDP conference courses are excellent, but the structure does not allow for a set curriculum that covers all the bases and is accessible to students when the students need them. This is the role of a school.
ASDP friends are already playing a role in SCCandA’s development. Joyce appreciates the involvement and freely admits, “I cannot do this alone!” She needs your help. You can read "It Takes a Team to Build a School," a recent post to Joyce's Tailoring YOUR Style blog on the JSM Tailoring Tools website. Go to http://www.jsmtailoringtools. com/it-takes-a-team-to-build-a-school/ to read the post and view the video clips. (Patty’s enthusiastic response to Brenda’s comb covering technique is worth a listen!) The post tells the story of a fun get together in Bellingham, Washington that Brenda
Breitenmoser, Patty Robison, Linda Macke and Joyce Murphy cooked up at the conference last fall in Minneapolis. Brenda moves into the teacher’s role. Patty, Linda and Joyce become Brenda’s students as they experiment with Joyce’s method for bringing an online tailoring lesson to life with pictures, screen-casting and narration all pulled together on the computer and recorded for future development.
Joyce is looking forward to SCCandA progress in 2016. Joyce has been working on SCCandA as time allows inbetween caring for grandchildren (her other passion in life) with plans to return to business full-time mid-March. The new pole barn studio anxiously awaits!
Early spring in northern Michigan is an excellent time for new beginnings as the ground starts to thaw and new sprouts emerge. Look for new courses to appear on the SCCandA website by late spring / early summer now that the groundwork is laid. Joyce has promised to keep her ASDP friends abreast of SCCandA developments as they occur. She sincerely appreciates your kind words and moral support!
