June 25, 2023

Dear Friends,

We have three doorbells to let us know when people are coming into the quilt shop.  A driveway motion detector, an automatic regular doorbell at the front door, and Sandy the poodle.  On occasion the driveway doorbell goes off . . . a nice musical ring . . .  then Sandy starts barking, but it’s sometimes a false alarm.  No car coming up.  Still, we always feel obligated to stop what we’re doing and go check, partially to rescue people from Sandy scaring them when they walk in the door.  For the false alarms, we always say it must have been a long-eared jack rabbit going by it.  

So the other day, I jumped up, looked out the front door, and there actually was a bunny going down the driveway and setting off the alarm.  It was a nice and adorable live bunny which is NOT the kind that causes trouble.

Dust bunnies are the type that is an ever-present bane of all quilt shops.  As smooth and well made as high-quality quilting threads are, they are still fuzzy.  Constantly running in our longarm machines, the threads emit a haze of thread fibers into air, fibers that all settle to the floor as a fleet of variously-sized dust bunnies.  The bunnies amass everywhere.  We do our best to keep them swept up, but they hide under things and go to unreachable corners until we are done sweeping, and then they come out again almost immediately.

We have a couple of good vacuuming robots that are great, but they aren’t  able to navigate all the machine cords required in a shop such as ours.  Running over cords, they quickly get stuck and become useless.  So whenever you come into our shop, please be considerate of the bunnies, and perhaps thankful of our efforts to keep them under control. What's more, we would appreciate it if you would come into the shop to help us look for and exterminate hidden bunnies.

Chip