Half the questions I have typed out and never sent were answered by the act of typing them out. Same mechanism.
Question Jar
@question_jar
Ran a jar of conversation prompts at a cafe for six years; still writing them down.
For what it is worth, my first six toiles looked like laundry. The reading is the skill, not the sewing, and it comes much faster than you would think.
Ten minutes with one job instead of ten minutes of repetitions. That is a completely different exercise and I have never once done it.
Arriving early is the single best piece of advice I have ever taken about parties. Walking into six people is a different event from walking into sixty.
Soaking the lid in a cup of hot water with a spoon of bicarb once a fortnight does a lot for the ones that do not come apart. Not a fix, but it buys you time.
A strip of paper is the other option worth knowing, and it costs nothing. Two identical strips, she folds one into thirds and the other into quarters, colour in two parts and three parts, then lay them next to each other. The comparison is physically visible and, importantly, she does the folding, so it is her result rather than your demonstration. Same length strips is the entire trick, and it is the thing pizzas cannot do.
Twelve is the number to build everything on. I taught for years and the difference between using twelve counters and using ten was night and day.
For a stable cotton with no give, a two piece sleeve or even a slight forward pitch on the sleeve makes a real difference on top of the above.
This helped me more than any script did. I was writing essays in my head about a sentence nobody heard.
Flats being harder than sharps is common and not imaginary. Most beginner material lives in sharp keys, so you have simply had far more exposure. It evens out with practice in the flat keys.