Sept 15 (supposed to be 13) 2023
Dear Friends,
Fox Country Quilts has been transformed into a bee hive, even more so than before. Have the pedal to the metal now in preparation for the Sulphur Springs Quilt Show coming up weekend after next, Friday and Saturday. The starting gun came this morning in the form of a staff-wide meeting, although both Donna and Kim have already been working extra hours getting quilts ready.
As vendors, we have lots of things to pack and lots of decisions to make about what to take and what not to take. We’ll be taking a couple of longarm quilting machines, and you will have opportunity to test-drive them. We’ll be taking several Baby Lock machines of various sorts, some at the top end of their type and some at the lower end, which are still great quality. We’ll have regular sewing machines, embroidery machines, some dual purpose sewing & embroidery machines, and sergers . . . and people who are expert in using these. We’ll have a good selection of Fat Quarters, some kits, plenty of notions, and all the other stuff you would expect a top vendor to carry to a show.
At this morning’s meeting, we worked out the logistics for getting all of this in place The plan is to get everything ready to load by Wednesday evening. Also on Wednesday, I’ll get the truck rented and hopefully be able to bring it home to park in our parking overnight. Thursday morning, we’ll roll out of bed and into the truck, to get it loaded. We’ll load, quickly as we can, drive down to Sulphur Springs, unload, and then I’ll drive back. Donna, Penny, and Kim will stay there to get us all set up and ready for the quilt show to open the next day. The show will run from Friday, Sept. 22, 9am-5pm, and then on Saturday, Sept. 23, 9am-2:30pm. By then, I’ll have the truck back in place ready to re-load. It will then come back to our shop for unloading, and then return to the U-Haul rental here in Commerce. A tiring three days, but all of us our really great workers.
The bee colony analogy fits pretty well, and we have one of the world’s best crews for a quilt shop. You’ll want to be sure to meet them and talk with them. Donna is the queen bee, the organizer, motivator, coordinator, etc enabling us to pull this off. I’m the drone. The worker bees are all quilters, vital to the success of our shop, and each also has a speciality. Penny is the embroidery expert, working mostly on dual purpose (sewing/embroidery) machines. She also finds frequent use for the ten-needle embroidery machine she has at home. Kim is the serger expert, with proven capability of turning out lots of different serger projects, some of which you’ll see at the show. Although Penny and Kim are also getting to be pretty great with the longarms and Pro-Stitcher, Donna is the queen bee longarm and Pro-Stitcher expert.
James is fast becoming our tech person. He has gone with me on several longarm service calls, and soon as we can get him certified with HandiQuilter, he’ll be the person you see when your machine needs to be serviced. He will also be our Baby Lock tech, and right now is in the process of Baby Lock certification training. He is also a quilter! I fully expect he’ll be a better tech than I am. He’s a real bull dog in solving difficult machine problems. Sandy our poodle is also part of the hive, functioning as our early warning system whenever some one comes to the shop.
Be sure to not miss the quilt show. Here’s the address near downtown Sulphur Springs:
The Roc
115 Putnam
Sulphur Springs, TX 75482
Chip
