Machine quilter blog ring

This morning it appears I no longer have to read and try to understand how to create a blog ring for machine quilters…..someone already started one. This is the site for where you can find the information. http://blog.saltcreekquiltco.com/

I’m sure glad one has been started!! I wasn’t all that keen on devoting the time necessary to run one. I knew there was a need; I just don’t know that much about computers.

I took my quilts to the fair Saturday. As usual I was finishing my entries up the night before they had to be dropped off. This year the show should be interesting. I took 6 quilts and there was another Estes dropping off 6 quilts at the same time. My customers are going to be confused by the name Estes on 12 quilts. They may wonder why I entered that many instead of completing their quilts.

I went to guild meeting Sunday. The drawings for everyone are done. I didn’t take all the work I had done on mine because I didn’t want the others to think they should have more done on theirs. I try to get as much of mine done before the Christmas rush gets into full swing so I always have much more finished than the rest of the group. During August through December I usually don’t do much piecing of my own.

I’m hoping to change that this year though. I was browsing through my fabric stash and pattern stash thinking of ways to get it better organized. I came across some patterns of things I really want to make but the organizing must be done first. A quilted coat is definitely on my agenda.

While looking through all my quilting stuff I was trying to think about how much time I want to devote to the different types of quilt work I do. It occurred to me that the best way to get good organizing perspective on quilt plans is to list them. Give it a try. You will see what I mean. Here is my hurried up list for this morning.

Art quilts – I love the art part of quilting! I really want to make some for the galleries that keep asking me to make some. How many? It should be at least 6.

Charity quilts – 5 for the nursing home, 5 for the women’s shelter, and 5 for the homeless men.

Contest quilts – one or two for MQS and MQX then one for Paducah and one for Nashville. Yes, I want to try for those shows even though I’ve not tried before.

Machine quilting for customers – always a heavy schedule!

Charity quilts for auction – Art for the animals, Farnsley Moorman House, the Mayor, and a couple of others have requested an art quilt that can be auctioned. Not a traditional pieced quilt but large art pieces.

Quilts for the grandkids – I have 16 ½ grandkids and 4 great-grandkids. I haven’t made one for them in several years.

Custom made clothing quilts – I can never know how many I will be commissioned to do in this area. Last year I did 35 custom made clothing quilts.

Gee, looking at it all written here sure lets me know where I have gone wrong. Listing everything sure puts it into a different perspective doesn’t it? No way can I do all this work! No wonder
I was feeling overwhelmed and complaining I didn’t have a life.

Ok, I’ve worked myself into a panic mode writing it all down. It’s time for me to go do some machine quilting while I think of which to eliminate and which to keep on the agenda.

More about computer time

I don’t have any finished pictures today. The one on the machine is going to take me three or four days to finish because I have to be gone this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon.

I appreciate everyone who reads my blog! It gives me a really good feeling to know I am helping someone.

There were some readers who may have misunderstood what I was explaining in my post yesterday. I do belong to a couple of online groups. I love that I can get on the computer and ask for advice and immediately get several different answers to consider. I love the camaraderie of belonging to a group! I also visit blog rings and websites. It’s just that I limit my computer time when I have deadlines to meet.

I’m not a member of quilt mavericks but I read their blogs every so often. I know when someone is feeling sad or happy or overwhelmed or relaxed. I know that Judy’s book is the #1 seller on Amazon and that Bonnie is going on a road trip. But I also know that one person hauled out a 30 year old furnace from her basement and another person saw lots of butterflies in a field. I know one person took her daughter to Baltimore for a birthday and a shop owner is making strip quilts.

I’m not a member of the artful quilters’ blog ring but I feel as if I know them like next door neighbors. One person just moved from the big city to a rural home in Tennessee. One person lives near me and belongs to the same art guild here in Louisville. (I gotta introduce myself to her at one of the LAFTA meetings.) Another member goes to the same Waterfront Wednesday that I do.

What I was trying to do yesterday was to get others to THINK about the time they spend on the computer IF they are having a hard time keeping up with machine quilting scheduling. The big name quilters get off the computer when they want to accomplish something, why couldn’t we do the same?

Ok, time for me to get started today. I’m hoping to read more about starting a blog ring. I have read some of the instructions and it doesn’t seem so hard. I want to read more to be sure I can handle it before committing to starting it. I’m not that computer literate ya know….I muddle through as best I can.

Scheduling?

Here are today's pictures of finished quilts.




The last few days I’ve been invited to join several new web groups. Hmm… they must have heard I’m trying to cut back on my internet time and thought they would tempt me to abandon my goal. There are far too many web groups and all of them very tempting! It seems that all the ‘big name’ quilters are starting web sites or groups that require membership to read the information contained in the site or whatever they may call it.

These sites are what I call ‘online guilds’. They operate much the same way an ‘in person guild’ operates. There is membership, participation, teaching, challenges, activities, show and tell, along with other things common to guilds. So how many guilds can one person belong to and still operate a machine quilting business?

I had to ask myself; would I join 15 or 20 ‘in person’ quilt guilds here in Louisville? If I did join that many guilds, when would I have time for actually working? I would be constantly going to guild meetings and participating in their activities. Where would that leave the time devoted to customer quilts? The only difference between an ‘in person’ guild and an ‘on line’ guild is the distance I would commute to participate. On line I am traveling to another part of my house; in person I would travel to another house.

I have noticed one common question in place after place on the quilt net circuit. It might be on an email list. It might be on a discussion forum. It might be on a blog ring. It might be on a website. The most common question seems to be “how do you schedule your time”. The people asking this question appear to be the same names I see in place after place while surfing around myself. I keep wondering why they are participating in several daily online groups instead of quilting? Did they schedule online time among their machine quilting time?

So let me ask you this…. How often do you see the “big name” quilters on the sites of other “big name” quilters? Do you see Linda Taylor (Gammill fame) posting to any discussion group? Do you see the names Sharon Schamber or Karen McTavish or Carol Beyer Fallert or Ricky Tims or Alex Anderson, or any one of dozens of big name quilters, show up on any site or discussion group other than their own? Why? It’s my opinion they don’t participate in discussion groups because they now have a “big name” so there is no need to market themselves in groups anymore. They have graduated from being one of the online crowds to a marketable personality.

I also believe the big name people are extremely smart business people, or maybe it is the significant other who is extremely smart. They saw the need for one person to do nothing but quilt while the other took over all other duties. I don’t even believe the quilter is the one actually running the sites. I believe it is the significant other who is running the site and posting.

Heavens, if I had someone do everything for me while I did nothing but create quilts I could become a famous name person too! Yes, I do believe that. I have the knowledge and capability. I just don’t have someone who believes in me enough to be willing to take over all other duties for me while I create. I don’t have anyone to market me.

Nor do I have anyone to pay the bills for me while I indulge my fantasy to create a quilt to win a major quilt show someday. No one believes in me that much. Not my kids, not my friends, no one but me believes in me.

So this has been my thoughts for today. I could finish this post and surf around for two or three hours but customer quilts are waiting. I could go join a group or two but that won’t get the work done or the bills paid. No, I will stick with the one or two sites I belong to for now. Maybe later I will unsubscribe from one and join another...who knows what the future will be? I am sticking to my rule of limited internet time until I find someone who believes in me too.

Why do we stash?

Here is today’s finished quilt. I almost finished a second one. Just a couple of hours more and it will be done. As you may have noticed, I’m no longer counting down toward time off. I had to make a financial decision that requires me to keep working.

I’ve been planning out my organizing once again. It seems all the work I did last January has completely come undone. I always try to find what is not working then find a solution. Obviously what I did back in January isn’t working so now it’s up to me to find another way to organize.

I started my organizing by trying to clean up my computer. The computer seems to be one of my most neglected areas of clutter. I have a ton of things on my computer that would be best moved to cds. I had a new cd drive put into my computer just so I could backup data. It’s not working or maybe I just need to learn the right way to use it. When I get the computer cleaned up it should start moving a little faster.

I saw on TV (in a news report last night) that people are saving tons of emails and book marking sites that they never get around to reading because there is too much information. Wow! I think I said the same thing several weeks ago. No longer are people vegetating in front of a TV, now days they are vegetating in front of a computer screen.

A few years ago I moved my tv to the farthest room away from my quilting studio. I had to break myself from spending so much time watching it. It was really hard to do.

I think it’s time for me to break myself from spending so much time on the computer. The internet is like one gigantic shopping mall with constant advertisements. No, not the pop up type; I mean the telling of gidgets and gadgets other people have bought and love. Think about it…. How many websites or blogs have you visited where someone tells about a new quilting gidget or gadget then thought to yourself…. I want one of those! Then you buy it. The internet is like spending hours and hours day after day in a shopping mall trying to keep up with the Jones’s.

Then there is the visiting of blogs where people show their fabric stashes. Some are all sorted by size and color and stacked neatly in cabinets. Some studios are completely disorganized and filled with tons and tons of fabric. Some quilters take over their whole house with fabrics and quilting gadgets. Some blogs tell of visiting fabric stores and bringing home new purchases to store away in an already filled sewing room. Why do we buy and keep so much of it?

Could it possibly be we believe the world will suffer some sort major disaster and fabric will no longer be made? Could it be we believe another depression is about to hit us or we will suffer some type of loss of our income and we must stockpile quilting stuff just in case? Do we believe the thrift stores will go out of business too so that we couldn’t use old clothing for quilts if we could no longer buy fabric by the yard? Do we believe the library will cease to exist and we couldn’t check out books so we buy tons of quilting books to put into our stash? Just what has all quilters believing the larger our stash the better quilter we are?

Do you think the quilters of yesteryear had hugh fabric and gadget stashes? Did their quilting stuff take over room after room? Yet there were some really beautiful quilts still around from back then. What did they do that modern quilts are not doing? Think about it for awhile. I will too.

Buying fabrics and quilting gadgets can really ruin a budget. I know; I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on quilting stuff. Do I use everything? No way, there are not enough hours in the day to get around to using everything I have stored away gathering dust. Could I have used some of that money for other things? Absolutely! If I had saved my money instead of buying more dust catchers or fabric stash for the studio I probably would have had the money to fix up this house already.

Now that I’ve given you some things to think about; I’m headed to the studio. I’m going to do some more thinking about this too.

Organizing mood again

These are pictures of the quilts I finished this week. These are three of my five fair entries for this year. I actually got them all finished for a change. Usually I don’t. I did feel a little guilty about not working on customer quilts. But hey, sometimes I just gotta do something that makes me happy or else I won’t be happy working on customer quilts. Being unhappy always leads to problems. I was also sick in bed two days this week. I don’t know what was wrong, just that I felt awful and had a stuffy head. It was probably the high pollution count the last few days.

I’m in an organizing mood again. I’ve let my quilting stuff take over the house again so it is time for reorganizing. I started with the computer which is loaded with photos and moving very slow.

I tried moving my quilt pictures off the computer and onto a CD. It didn’t work. I haven’t a clue why? Do I need to do something to a CD before it can accept stuff? I keep getting a message that the disks are not usable. I did have a new CD drive put into the computer a few weeks ago. This is the first time I tried to use it. I also bought CDs that say rewriteable. But, do they need to be formatted or something to work?

Sunday is my day for shopping. Today I’m going to look at some organizing things. I don’t plan to buy anything just look for ideas. I don’t buy organizing items because someone says I should. I look for ideas then keep them in mind as I start sorting through what it is I want to organize.

Ok, enough post writing, my organizing genes are telling me to go do something useful.