Tuesday, November 13, 2012

A Quilt a Day



A Quilt a Day


When I started quilting as my job, I would arrange the quilts that were brought to me in cubby holes on the back wall of the studio.  Each week I would do the last quilt I needed to get done and painstakingly move all the quilts still in cubbies to the left row of holes so I could have my order.  I need order!


This worked fine for a while.  I usually had enough cubbyholes for the quilts on hand.  One day they started lining up along the wall because there were not enough cubby holes and I could no longer realistically look at the wall of cubbies and guess how long this customer’s quilt would be waiting for its turn on the machine.  I needed a plan and I needed it NOW.
I loaded a calendar program onto my computer during my Christmas break in my second full year of quilting and I took each quilt from its cubby in the order they were going to be quilted and I estimated how long I thought it would take me to do that quilt according to what my worksheet said I was to do on it. This took me several days, but by the end of that time I had my order!  I had 5 week of quilts waiting for me to do my magic.

4 quilts in waiting
This freed me from a huge burden.  I no longer sounded stupid when someone wanted to know when I would have their quilt would be ready for pick up.  It also opened up many options for my customers.  They could now schedule a quilt DATE.  What a novel idea! 
The best part was I got rid of the guilt I felt about wanting to quilt one of my own quilts.  What is the use of having a quilting machine if I can’t quilt one for myself every now and again.


It took me another full year to realize I needed to schedule time for me to take a break once in a while.

1 comment:

  1. Having done some very simple quilting of my own (and I'm a real newbie) I can see how quilting as a business is a very time consuming one. You definitely need to schedule your breaks.

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