It's Valentine's Day, so I'm going to write about some of the quilty things I love. Do you have a favorite fabric company, one whose style and taste leaves you breathless and inspires quilt after quilt? I feel that way about Moda fabric. The folks at Moda pretty much invented precuts and their jelly rolls and turnovers are always beautifully packaged. The visual quality and feel of their fabric is a cut above the rest, so I am happy to announce my first ever contest in this newsletter will reward the winner with a HUGE basket of Moda fabric. Read on!

     Last month I told you guys about how the big chain stores like JoAnns and WalMart are going after quilters. That's a news story and I'm a journalist. The quilt magazines aren't likely to report about that, because fabric companies are some of their biggest advertisers, but I will. 

     But I wanted to follow that up with a rant about local quilt shops, and why it's vital to support them. 

     It isn't just that the chain stores sell mostly inferior quality fabric that won't hold up to the loving and washing a quilt should withstand. Even if they begin to stock better fabric ---which they're starting to do -- the chains can't compete with the amazing personal service of the average independent quilt shop.

     Here are just a few of the things my local quilt shop, Pennington Quilt Works has done for me that JoAnn's and WalMart can't:

     **great advice on matching fabrics, picking just the right batting and backing

     **big discounts & a gift for my birthday every year

    **gorgeous selections of my favorite fabric designers like Kaffe Fassett, Jane Sassaman, Amy Butler and Lonni Rossi, plus rows and rows of batiks

    ** prints and solids I don't know I need until I've already picked out a bunch of the above

    **a huge wall of notions, and the knowledge of which tools work best for which techniques

    **fantastic classes. I would still not know how to machine quilt without these fabulous ladies!

     Every single time I set foot in that shop, it makes my day. I can bring them fragments of a half-baked idea for a quilt, and when I walk out of there, I've got all I need for a masterpiece. They make me a better quilter, and make me feel good every time I go there. 

    And here is the absolute topper: when I went to the owner of the shop and said "I have a quilt book coming out, could I possibly have my launch party here?" she said "Sure." And what an awesome party she threw for me and 100 of my friends and her best customers. There was wine and food and candlelight and flowers. We had so much fun, and I am happy to say, she sold a ton of books. 

     Your local quilt shop isn't run out of a headquarters somewhere telling them what to sell and when to open: it is part of your community. And if you don't support it, it won't be there. 

     According to my sources in the quilt world, hundreds of quilt shops closed their doors in the past 5 years. Hundreds more also opened in that time, more than closed. If you care about personal service, support your local shop!!!!

     So, now for the contest part. 

   

     Send me your quilt shop love story -- at meg@megcox.com. 

     I will print the winner's story in my March issue.

    

    I often joke when I lecture that I approached my 600 page resource guide, The Quilter's Catalog, like I was the Wall Street Journal reporter for quilts. During my early reporting on the book, I was amazed at what a great, hidden business story I had stumbled upon in the quilt world. 

     I continue to think like a business journalist, so I get very excited when I come across a company like an AccuQuilt or HandiQuilter that takes a genius product, and then builds a great company around it. The people who work there are electrified with passion for what they sell and provide, and the companies are growing in leaps.

     That's happening right now, with a new company called Craftsy that you should know about. It's principle product, online classes, might not sound sexy, but Craftsy is like Moda, a player that outshines its category. 

    There is no shortage of online quilt classes, and most suffer from similar shortcomings. Many function like a combo of a powerpoint slideshow with a chat room for leaving questions. If there is video at all, the quality of either the teaching or the image isn't sterling. 

     But that is not how it works at Craftsy. This is a company that didn't start with a love of quilts, but an aptitude for nerd work, a new idea about how to teach stuff online. It was founded by 2 engineers from internet companies and 3 MBAs from top biz schools who came from companies like eBay and Yahoo.

     "All of the founders felt deeply committed to online education. Many had wanted to be teachers or had wives who were teachers," says Emily Lawrence, a former modern dancer and video producer who is a vp at Craftsy. "They started the company with the premise that online education was not fulfilling the promise of the internet: too often, online classes were only presented at a certain hour, and there was no way to ask questions."

     The idea was that students can take the class anytime they want, and still get to ask questions, because at every point of the instructional video, they can scroll down and see what others have asked. If their question isn't listed, they can ask it and will hear back from the teacher or another student almost immediately. 

     The other concept is quality: all the instructors have been carefully vetted, and all the step-by-step videos are shot in high def, with good light and sound. 

     Sympoz is the parent company, and when it began in the fall of 2010, they picked 10 topics to experiment with, from wine-appreciation and financial planning to quilting and knitting. They were shocked by how quickly the craft classes took off, and put most of their eggs in that basket, developing Craftsy as a subsidiary and working to create a community online, not just a bunch of videos. 

     The results have been simply amazing, and Craftsy is growing like crazy. Both the Quilting Club and Knitting Club on Facebook, which are Craftsy groups, have exceeded 200,000 "fans" at this point, and more than 100,000 people have taken a Craftsy class. Quilting has been a particularly hot area for the company, and new classes are being added all the time: Pepper Cory's Scrap Quilting class just launched, and one of the most popular is Wendy Butler Bern's machine-quilting. 

      But seeing is believing. People who haven't tried the Craftsy platform might be reluctant to pay up to $60 for a series of online classes. So they have done a brilliant thing: starting at the beginning of 2012, they created a Block-of-the-Month class that is totally FREE. You can join now and quickly catch up: the January and February segments are up now, with more coming. Under the tutelage of perky Amy Gibson, you will be shown how to make 20 blocks using 10 different techniques. There are 2 blocks per month, and at the end of the year, she will offer lessons on finishing the quilt. 

    Obviously, lots of quilters have already discovered Craftsy's quilt classes: more than 58,000 quilters from all over the world have already signed up to do the Block of the Month. If you want to find out more and sign up for this free class, click on the photo above. 

     And you will probably want to check out Craftsy's main website http://www.craftsy.com/, because they keep adding new stuff. Just a couple weeks ago, they opened a section of the site to selling online patterns, and unlike other sites, they don't take a cut of the sales. In just the first weekend alone, they sold 4,623 patterns from 578 designers.

    See what I mean? These folks are smokin'.

Click on Lady Liberty to go to the Quilt Alliance

 

 

 

 

Thanks for coming by again. I hope you have a wonderful Valentine's Day. Don't forget to check out the awesome fabrics designed by Yolanda Fundora at Urban Amish, and use the rebate coupon at the bottom. I used mine last month, and I love the gorgeous fabrics that I bought.